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THE THRESHOLD 
Rev. HENRY HOWARD 


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THE THRES 


Studies in the First Psalm 


BY 


Rey. HENRYYHOWARD 


Author of “The Peril of Power,” “The 
Beauty of Strength,” etc. 
PREACHER AT THE FIFTH AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN 
CHURCH, NEW YORK CITY 


NEW wy YORK 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


COPYRIGHT, 1926, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


THE THRESHOLD 
ae as pe 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OE AMERICA 


PREFACE 


Almost every country presents among its physi- 
cal features the case of some mountain range 
which serves as a great dividing line, a watershed 
for its river system. The springs which burst 
from the rocks on one side of the range are often 
found trickling down the mountain side, till 
gathering in force and flow they become a mighty 
stream, sweeping onward to the sea. Those on 
the other side flow down in different directions, 
draining another tract of country, to find them- 
selves at last meeting the ocean with, it may be, 
the breadth of a whole continent between them 
and their fellows, with whom they started from 
almost the selfsame source. Any seemingly in- 
significant incident, such as the falling of a tree, 
a slight landslide in the vicinity of the divide, or 
even the tread of some wild thing’s foot, may 
deflect either stream at its source and thus change 
its issue by thousands of miles. 

The stream of human life is also challenged at 
its source by the alternative of a great divide. 


Unlike the mountain stream, it is dowered with 
Vv 


al PREFACE 


choice and gifted with the power of self-direction. 
Upon the choice it makes will its issue depend. 
Destiny pivots on the will. Right and wrong 
are rival candidates for its suffrage. ‘These are 
the two alternatives, between which its choices lie, 
and with one or the other it must close. ‘There 
is no neutrality possible, neither can any combina- 
tion service be allowed. ‘These alternatives, as 
they are accepted or rejected, divide men into 
two widely divergent groups and the twofold 
classification is strongly indicated in our Psalm. 
It runs down through all Revelation. It marks 
all Christ’s teaching. He started His ministry 
by classifying men as wise and foolish, and He 
came to the close of His ministry without finding 
any reason for revising this twofold category. 
Wheat and chaff, good and evil, sheep and goats 
—into these two classes all humanity can be re- 
solved, and with one or the other of these groups 
each individual must find a place. 


Vill 


CONTENTS 


The Counsel of the Ungodly . 

Nor Standeth in the Way oy 
Sinners 

The Seat of the Seefil) 

But His Delight Is in the Law 
of the Lord 

In His Law Doth He M edie 
Day and Night . 

A Tree Planted by Rivers of 
Water 

Whatsoever He Doeth ‘Shall 
Prosper 

But the Ungodly Ae Not So 
But Are Like the Chaff 
Which the Wind Driveth 
Away 

The Ungodly Shall Not Svan 
in the Judgment 

For the Lord Knoweth the 
Way of the Righteous; But 
the Way of the pata 
Shall Perish 


vii 


PAGE 


11 


32 
51 


65 
81 
97 
113 


121 
137 


147 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
In 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/thresholdstudiesOOhowa_0 


THE THRESHOLD 


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THE THRESHOLD 


I 


The Counsel of the Ungodly 


This Threshold Psalm, as it might well be 
styled, is the crystallisation into poetry of both 
experience and observation. It cannot be deter- 
mined who was its author. If, as some critics 
have judged, it was Solomon, then he was well 
qualified to write on the folly and futility of 
taking wrong tracks in the pursuit of happiness, 
for he had tried many. We owe a great debt even 
to,those who have blundered when they thus 
leave behind them a record of experiments which 
they have tried and found to fail. If the experi- 
ence of the ages could keep men from straying, 
then long ere this would the world have been 
holding to the highways of righteousness and 
heading for the City of God. In traversing the 
Australian bush, amid towering trees and tangled 


undergrowth, there often opens up off the main 
If 


12 THE THRESHOLD 


track which the pioneer has cut, an inviting and 
fairly well-defined footway, which promises a 
short cut to one’s destination. Many a time, the 
writer has been lured by such an opening and 
taken the turn, only, however, to discover that it 
led to some wild thing’s lair and that he had to 
battle his way back, and often through the late 
night, torn with bramble and scrub to the spot 
from which he had strayed. Indeed, so frequently. 
did this occur, that it became an unwritten law 
of the forest that when one had thus been misled 
into a dead-end, he should, on regaining the main 
track, split a hazel and insert within its cleft a 
notice with the warning word “‘No road this way,” 
that others might not be similarly fooled. 

This Psalm is just such a caution. The man 
who wrote it had seen many a traveller go down 
the wild-beast track—the track of the animal 
nature—in the search for happiness. If it were 
Solomon, he had been down himself, and now 
disappointed, disillusioned and morally damaged, 
he flings out this danger signal to all who come 
after him, that there are certain roads which seem 
right unto a man, but the ends thereof are the 
ways of death. 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 12 


There are four great contrasts in this Psalm. 
Contrasted Choice, Contrasted Conduct, Con- 
trasted Character and Contrasted Destiny. The 
relation between these is severely and inexorably 
logical. ‘This Psalm makes every man the arbiter 
of his own fate—the captain of his own soul. It 
casts the onus of life’s success or failure upon 
the individual will. The writer of this Psalm 
recognises the immense significance of environ- 
ment. He assumes that a man inevitably takes 
the colour of the company that he voluntarily 
selects. There is true insight here, and all experi- 
ence springs to its endorsement. Here is the per- 
ception and registration of the great law of moral 
assimilation—a law that holds possibilities both 
up and down for human life, of such transcendent 
magnitude as to smite the soul with speechless 
awe. 

Love of the highest will mean association with 
the highest. Association will mean assimilation. 
Assimilation will mean eternal development and 
ever-growing likeness to God. What we “like,” 
we come to “liken” by the working of a subtle 
but inevitable law. When our spirits thus meet 
and mingle with the Spirit of God and our love 


14 THE THRESHOLD 


for Him becomes supreme, we are “changed into 
the same image, from glory to glory, by the spirit 
which is the Lord.” 

If, however, on the other hand, our love runs 
low and fixes on the base and unworthy, then 
there, too, the law will work, “what is fine within 
us growing coarse to sympathise with clay.” The 
love of evil will mean association with evil. Asso- 
ciation will mean assimilation to the evil one, 
till we shall be changed into the same image, from 
vileness into vileness, as by the spirit of hell. Of 
course, care must be taken here to distinguish be- 
tween associations that are deliberately chosen, 
and those which are thrust upon us by the neces- 
sities of an uncontrollable circumstance. 

Our duty may compel us at times to associate 
with the unclean in life and speech, but as long 
as we react against and repel it—as long as the 
soul resents it and recoils from it—as long as 
it is an offence to us, and our whole manhood or 
womanhood gathers itself up in indignant protest 
against it, as a hateful and contaminating thing, 
we shall get no harm from it. On the contrary, 
by our very reaction against it, we shall gather 
in moral force and fibre. We shall be creative 
of an atmosphere that will not only disarm it of 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 15 


evil to ourselves, but become morally hygienic 
toward others. 

If, however, we stay in such company of choice, 
a moment longer than necessary—if we deliber- 
ately linger and loiter in the society of those who 
have no fear of God before their eyes, then we 
incur a risk that it is neither lawful nor safe for 
us to run. There is an incident recorded in the 
life of the Prince of Orange that finely illustrates 
this principle. In the conduct of one of his sieges, 
he was sitting on his horse directing operations, 
with the bullets of the besieged flying round him. 
A gentleman rode up to him with a letter which 
the prince hastily opened and read, then thanking 
his messenger, he turned again to his business. 
The gentleman, however, instead of retiring to a 
safe place, remained within the danger zone. The 
prince, observing him, pointed out the peril, to 
which he replied, “I run no greater risk than 
your Highness!” ‘No,’ said the prince, “but 
my duty requires me to stay here and yours does 
not.” He had hardly spoken the word when a 
ball from the enemy’s camp pierced the gentle- 
man’s heart and he fell lifeless to the ground. 
General Gordon held that a man was immortal 
till his work was done and that in the path of duty 


16 THE THRESHOLD 


i 


he bore a charmed life. This is certainly true in 
the realm of morals, but when we deliberately 
expose ourselves to moral danger and expect to 
escape unharmed, we strain faith to the breaking 
point of presumption where it will meet with the 
rebuke that it deserves. 

In this picture of the Blessed Life, the Psalmist 
first of all presents us with a certain background 
of negative qualities. ‘Blessed is the man that 
walketh not in the counsel of the wicked, nor 
standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in 
the seat of the scornful.” By the “wicked” we 
are to understand those who have deliberately cut 
God out of their creed, and who order their lives 
as though their repudiation of His authority had 
caused Him to cease to be. But when a man 
cuts God out of life, he cannot stop there. He 
must go on to cut conscience out of his councils, 
and accountability out of his conduct, because 
apart from God, these have no adequate sanction 
or support. ‘This cutting-out process destroys the 
sanctity and security of life. It so reacts on a 
man’s whole being as to reduce its value as a social 
factor. A man is not of the same worth to society 
who repudiates those fundamental and integrat- 
ing principles by which alone the well-being of 


, 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY uf 


the social organism is secured. Indeed, he be- 
comes a menace. In its own interests, society 
must repudiate the man who repudiates God, lest 
by a swift contagion he infect the mass. The 
elements that bind society into peace and pros- 
perity are moral and these moral elements, if 
they are to retain their authority over the minds 
of men, must be shown to have their root and 
origin in the everlasting righteousness of a Per- 
sonal God. A universal disbelief or even doubt 
as to the Divine existence, would at once depre- 
ciate all values. The worth of human life de- 
pends upon the reality, the richness and the dura- 
bility of its relations. If it be merely a wave 
lifted for a brief moment into consciousness, only 
to sink back into the ocean of oblivion; if percep- 
tion and reflection, memory and imagination, love 
and friendship, courage and fidelity, womanly 
tenderness, manly skill and little children’s trust, 
all come to flower and fruit only to perish in the 
dust; if immortality be only a priest’s fiction, a 
poet’s fancy, a painter’s dream; if we are simply 
flung out from impersonal matter by impersonal 
force to fall back again into the impersonal mass, 
what inducement is there to hold on and endure? 
There are no points in preserving consciousness 


18 THE THRESHOLD 


and keeping up this dance of molecules which con- 
stitute our separate existences, especially when 
the tune they play does not suit, and when by 
a single act we can stop the music, ring down 
the curtain and put out the lights. Where is the 
sense of holding on to so impoverished a thing as 
existence must then become, when pain like liquid 
fire is pouring through our nerves and smiting our 
lives apart? 

The supreme test of a creed is how it works 
out in deed. What kind of character does it pro- 
duce? “By their fruits ye shall know them,” is 
as true of systems of belief as it is of individuals. 
Here is a test as simple as it is satisfactory. The 
wayfaring man can apply it though he may know 
nothing of horticulture. He can discern the differ- 
ence between grapes and thorns and may be 
safely trusted not to confound thistles with figs. 
The belief that God is our Father, that we are the 
children of His heart and His home, that we came 
forth from Him and shall return to Him, that 
we shall find in Him the answer to all our long- 
ings, the solution of all our problems, and the 
fulfilment of all our hopes—this is the faith that 
has made the men that have made the world. 
Under its inspiration they have found the courage 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 19 


to attempt, the power to achieve and the patience 
to endure. All the crystallised wisdom of the 
ages, that gathers itself up in prophecy or proverb 
or psalm, has been the outcome of this belief. The 
world has come thus far upon the onward way, 
because this has been the faith of her higher 
spirits in every age. This is the victorious music 
to which she has marched and the nations that 
have kept in step with the beat of its drum are the 
nations that have led the van in mental strength 
and moral power. Wherever a community has 
held this faith loosely, or allowed it to become 
obscured by absorption in material pursuits, it 
has lowered its vitality and made a bid for decay. 
The denial of God means the negation of duty 
and life with no sense of duty forfeits the right 
to be at large. Better bestow the freedom of the 
city on a mad dog than allow those who have 
no fear of God before their eyes to poison the 
mind, pervert the conscience and corrupt the 
morals of mankind. 

Life with no sense of duty becomes a mockery 
to itself. It cannot come to fullest self-expres- 
sion. It has no justification for continuance, and 
must be puzzled to know what to do with certain 
organic instincts which clamour for correlates 


20 THE THRESHOLD 


which earth and time cannot supply. We have 
hopes that outrun all worldly fulfilment, desires 
that exhaust all material sources of satisfaction 
and still cry out for more. We are conscious of 
potencies that outreach the stars, demanding the 
infinities for their reach and range. To accept 
the counsel of the ungodly as a guiding principle 
is to give the lie to all these. It is to shut the 
soul up in a mean and impoverished present with 
no past upon which to improve and with no future 
to inspire. What orphanage can be compared 
with this? ‘To be hemmed in on every side by the 
cold mechanism of inflexible law, against which 
there can be lodged no appeal for redress, where 
no plea can be heard for pity, no place be found 
for prayer. ‘Truly this is a counsel of despair! 
And to what dark depths of degradation it must 
sink the soul that listens to its doctrine the 
Psalmist would have us know that perchance he 
may turn our feet into the upward way. 

The word “counsel” in our Psalm would seem 
to indicate the attitude to be one of deliberate 
determination after the gros and cons of the situa- 
tion had been duly discussed. It was not that the 
question of God and their relation to Him with 
the obligations which it carried, had not occurred 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 21 


to their minds. Neither was it that the matter, 
having been mooted, had been allowed to go by 
default, by “moving the previous question.’ The 
idea sought to be conveyed is that the matter had 
come up for debate, that a settled course of pro- 
cedure had been agreed upon and that a resolution 
had been carried to leave God out of count and 
to order life without reference to His claims. 

it is rather a striking coincidence that in the 
second Psalm we have just such a condition of 
things portrayed. ‘““The kings of the earth set 
themselves, and the rulers take counsel together.” 
It was a “league of nations,’ banded together 
in an unholy alliance for the deliberate purpose of 
renouncing allegiance to the Highest. It was a 
clear-cut and definite policy of repudiation—the 
loosening of life from all moral consideration and 
restraint that it might plunge neck-free into any 
and every wild excess of revelry and devilry. It 
was a “declaration of right” to do as they pleased, 
accountable to no one but themselves. And this, 
let it be noted, was no swift and sudden decision, 
born of heat or passion, but a calm, cool and 
considered course of conduct upon which they had 
resolved. Had it been simply a great reaction 
after some world-wide disaster under which the 


22 THE THRESHOLD 


universal mind had been stunned and staggered; 
if their faith had been strained to its breaking 
point and all their hopes of good shattered into 
fragments and scattered in dust, there might have 
been some extenuation. In the dark days of his- 
tory, days of famine and flood, of battle and 
blood, when the earthly props on which we have 
leaned break under us, when fortunes fly and 
friends fail and the heart is sick with hope de- 
ferred; when the soul sits alone in the darkness 
and sighs for the ‘‘touch of a vanished hand and 
the sound of a voice that is still,” there may 
be some allowance made if the overwrought spirit, 
vexed beyond endurance, rises up in wrath and 
protest against the slings and arrows of outrageous 
fortune, demanding explanation or redress. But 
there is no such suggestion here, nothing to indi- 
cate that this revolt from law and order 1s the 
outcome of disaster that has shipwrecked their 
faith. Neither is it the uneducated, undisciplined 
masses of the people, the outcasts, the oppressed, 
writhing under the heel of tyranny and cursing 
the inequalities of fate that are here represented 
as questioning, as they might very well have done, 
the equity of God’s dealings and making their evil 
lot an excuse for their apostacy. Nay, not with 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 23 


these did this rebellion originate but with the 
kings and rulers and great ones of the earth. It 
has worked its way down from the palace to the 
populace. “Like Prince, like people’ has been 
ever true and so, as Ben Jonson wisely warns us: 


“Princes that would their people should do well 
Should at themselves begin, as at the head. 
For men by their example pattern out 

- Their imitations and regard for laws: 
A virtuous court, a world to virtue draws.” 


That this principle was at work in this old 
world society is clear from the structure of the 
Second Psalm. “Why do the heathen rage?” en- 
quires the Psalmist. “Why do the people imagine 
a vain thing?’ Then comes the answer which is 
a terrific indictment against the men in high 
places: “If you want to find the reason for all 
the seething discord and discontent of the crowd, 
the impatience of restraint, the unreasoning re- 
sentment against law and order that makes itself 
visible and vocal among the masses, look for it 
in their rulers, who, fools that they are, do not see 
that they are letting loose a monster that will 
turn and rend them.” The crowd does not think, 
it only feels. It is swayed by impulses. What 


24 THE THRESHOLD 


opinions it holds it has taken ready-made from 
others. ‘The abstract reasoning of their masters 
may be unintelligible to the many-headed mass, 
but even men who cannot follow the philosophy, 
can interpret the facts. Truth in the concrete, 
truth translated into action, truth embodied in 
history and working itself out in common life 
the man in the street can understand. He could 
not perhaps follow your reasoning through the 
proposition in Euclid which demonstrates that 
any two Sides of a triangle are together greater 
than the third, but he would at once agree that 
he could cut across a field in less time than it 
would take him to walk around. Yet this is only 
saying the same thing in another way. He would 
perhaps stand aghast and bewildered if you asked 
him to believe that “every particle in nature at- 
tracts and is attracted by every other particle 
with a force proportional to the mass and in- 
versely to the square of the distance,” but he 
would readily grasp your meaning if you told him 
that a brick would fall on his head from the roof 
of a house with greater force than would a penny 
bun; and yet this is only the same great law, 
stated in simpler terms. Thus it comes to pass 
that when atheistic philosophy translates itself 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 25 


from theory into practice, and men come to meas- 
ure what they may do, by what they can do, so 
that “Might” spells “Right,” then the crowd 
begins to understand it and following its instruc- 
tors, seeks by “cornering’”’ as much as may be of 
brute force, to bruise its way, regardless of all 
moral considerations, to the goals of ungoverned 
desire. 

This is the futility and fatality of a godless 
philosophy; it becomes self-destructive. An 
Australian boomerang has been known to circle 
round till, in its returning flight, it has severed 
the jugular vein of the thrower from whom it 
received its initial impulse. One stands amazed 
at the superlative insolence which, while all the 
time dependent on God’s bounty, consents to 
accept God’s generous gift of life, together with 
all it carries of plenty and security, and yet pre- 
sumes to repudiate His right to be either recog- 
nised or obeyed. But apart from the impertinence 
that would thus first accept and then abuse God’s 
hospitality, I should like to lay bare the futility 
to which I have referred. The attempt to rule 
God out of life is as vain as an attempt would 
be to rule gravity out of matter. God simply 
declines to be dismissed. The sun does not cease 


26 THE THRESHOLD 


shining because a man closes his eyes to its light, 
and our blindness to God’s presence must not be 
construed as the equivalent of His absence. His 
trulership does not depend upon a referendum, nor 
does the moral law rely for its continuance upon 
a show of hands. The revolt against law and 
order, both human and divine, which Russia has 
presented in our day and which is already recoil- 
ing on the misled millions of her people, supplies 
a striking comment on the truth we are discussing. 
Disrated, distrusted, dishonoured, she stands 
among the nations as a menacing centre of social 
and moral contagion. Her contact with other 
countries is proving such a peril to their civilisa- 
tion, that in the interests of social sanitation and 
industrial efficiency the whole world round, it is 
becoming imperative that quarantine measures 
should be enforced against her till she can show 
a clean bill of health. Moral distempers are com- 
municable and they work like a fever in the blood. 
The Russian revolutionaries who signified their 
contempt of authority by exterminating the royal 
house, seemed to think that they had dealt a fatal 
blow to law and order because they had assas- 
sinated their representatives. The Czar however, 
as is the case with every earthly ruler, was simply 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 27 


a temporary symbol of an eternal principle. The 
symbol may perish and pass, as indeed all symbols 
must, but the qualities which are symbolised in 
kingship, howbeit imperfectly in the best of 
rulers, such as justice, truth, clemency and fair 
play to man and woman and little child, whether 
white or black, whether yellow or brown, these 
survive all the assaults of time and change. Even 
in Russia their hour will come, though it tarry. 
Amid all the wreckage of tottering thrones and 
falling kingdoms, truth and righteousness will 
hold on their victorious way till they have put 
down all rule and authority and power that exalts 
itself against the Lord and against His Anointed. 
And so we repeat, though men may rid themselves 
of the God-consciousness, they cannot get rid of 
the God-Fact. That abides unaltered and un- 
alterable ‘‘when all that seems, has suffered 
shock.” 

Men, for example, may render themselves un- 
conscious of physical light and sound, but the 
phenomena of light and sound are not thereby 
diminished or impaired. Their waves still break 
in beauty or in harmony on land and sea, though 
eyes be blind and ears be deaf. It is only childish 


28 THE THRESHOLD 


folly or grown-up conceit to suppose things exist 
only as they exist to us. 

An Australian stood with me one morning near 
the Bank in London and as we watched the whirl- 
ing traffic of that busy centre, he turned and said, 
“T cannot understand how all this can go on when 
I’m not here!’ But it does! And so the great 
forces of the moral world whether we have the 
wit to regard them or not move along their pre- 
determined course, casting down the mighty from 
their seats and exalting the humble and meek, 
for by daylight or by dark, God’s judgments are 
always abroad in the earth. “His thunderbolts 
have eyes, to see their way home to the mark.” 

We have already referred to the law of physi- 
cal gravity. Let us recur to it and expand the 
reference. Every builder in brick or stone is con- 
fronted with this law. It challenges him at every 
step. He cannot find a square inch upon the 
whole round earth where it does not rule. It is 
the law that demands uprightness in the world of 
things. It is a law that cannot be ignored. The 
would-be builder cannot bluff it nor bribe it into 
connivance or neutrality. He must have it either 
for him or against him in his work. It is an 
inspector that is always on duty, twenty-four 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 29 


hours a day and seven days a week, silently testing 
his work, approving what is good and condemning 
what is bad. Nor is its approval or condemnation 
merely passive. It is actively on the side of the 
structure which is upright, upholding it with all 
its might, while against that which is out of 
plumb, it stretches out a million hands to lay it 
even with the dust. Now that this law of physical 
gravitation has its counterpart in the moral realm 
is clear from Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on 
the Mount. The parable in which he contrasts the 
fortunes of the House on the Rock and that on 
the sand, sets forth the force of moral gravity at 
work on the structure of human character. We 
are all builders in this realm and have no choice. 
There are no unemployed in the moral realm. 
Build we must, after some fashion, and reckon 
we must with this uncompromising law. It 1s 
impossible of evasion. We must be either with it 
or against it. With it, we are secure; against it, 
we have not a hope. Christ and His teaching 
stood for this law and He employed its inevita- 
bleness to illustrate the contrasted destinies of 
those who obeyed or revolted from His rule. 
There is only one sure foundation for individual 
or national life and that is godliness. ‘There is 


30 THE THRESHOLD 


only one sound basis for morals, and that is reli- 
gion. There is only one sanction and security for 
the Brotherhood of Man, and that is the Father- 
hood of God. Any individual or system, any 
organisation or combination that starts out by 
ignoring God is looking for trouble and heading 
for ruin. The fortune of every social structure 
upreared by the hand of man will turn on its 
loyalty to God and its obedience to Christ. 
Speaking of Christ’s inevitable supremacy, the 
Apostle Paul declares “He shall abolish all rule 
and all authority and power, for he must reign till 
he hath put all his enemies under his feet.” 
Men may build themselves into guilds, frater- 
nities, boards of trade, trades unions, chambers 
of commerce, in fact into every kind of combine, 
but unless the structural principle of their edifice 
be loyalty to God and obedience to the moral law, 
they are building on sand and their structure is 
foredoomed. To such a building, God’s law is 
not simply neutral, it is positively hostile—hostile 
as gravity to the wall that is not plumb. Every 
human fraternity that ignores the Divine pater- 
nity will be consumed with the breath of His 
mouth and the brightness of His coming. He 
refuses to be counted out of our concerns. Come 
in He must and will, either as a binding or disrup- 


THE COUNSEL OF THE UNGODLY 31 


tive force, and every social or political institution, 
that either positively cuts Him out of its counsels 
or negatively ignores Him, will be swept into the 
same category and classed with the morally unfit. 
They are alike rooted in selfishness. But selfish- 
ness is anti-Christian and that which is anti- 
Christian is anti-social. The Gospel of Jesus 
holds the solution of all our social problems be- 
cause it strikes at selfishness which is the root of 
all. Never until men consent to accept the 
Golden Rule, can they bring in the Golden 
Age. Till then, there will be mutual hate, 
suspicion, exploitation, and all the black brood 
of evils that spring inevitably out of neglect 
or negation of God. It will be noted that the 
Revisers have substituted the word ‘“‘wicked” for 
the word “ungodly” in this verse. The change 
is deeply significant and suggests what is noto- 
riously true, that the mere negative position of 
ungodliness cannot be indefinitely sustained. In 
morals, all such negative situations tend by a swift 
and inevitable logic to resolve themselves into 
positive attitudes, so that as we shall see the man 
who begins by assimilating the counsels of the 
ungodly, will presently be found translating these 
counsels into positive and practical terms and 
taking his stand with sinful men. 


If 


Nor Standeth in the Way of Sinners 


The mere negative attitude of ungodliness is 
here seen passing into its positive stage. ‘This, 
as we have seen, was inevitable. ‘There is some 
subtle force at work which develops the negative 
situation ultimately into one of positive hostil- 
ity. Moments come which demand an instant and 
clean-cut decision. At such times, any attempt 
to hedge, or take refuge in no-man’s land breaks 
itself to pieces against the moral imperative which 
compels us to take sides. In such a case, there is 
no neutrality possible, nor can any combination 
service be allowed. The position taken up by the 
ungodly, analyses into objection to authority. It 
is a spirit of rebellion against restraint and of 
repudiation of any responsibility excepting to 
one’s self. Nor would this be so bad if it were 
the better self before which one’s choices and 
motives were arraigned. But alas! the war 
against authority is not only waged outwardly, 
but inwardly. It is carried back behind the lines. 

32 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 393 


The strife becomes internecine. It divides the 
man against himself, so that the sword is turned 
against that organic instinct within the breast 
that dares to speak for God and duty against the 
clamour of desire. Thus it comes to pass that he 
who becomes ungodly, renders himself by so 
much less a man. The grand distinctive mark | 
of manhood is the sense of accountability, first 
of all to conscience here, and then to the God of , 
conscience hereafter. ‘To discredit conscience is to ) 
stand discrowned. It is to renounce one’s higher 
nature and to step downward in the scale of being. 
It is to hand life over to the rule of brute instinct 
and blind passion. It is to revert to the stage of 


. . . the beast that takes 
His license in the fields of time, 
Unfettered by the sense of crime, 
In whom a conscience never wakes. 


Nor does this emancipation of one’s self from 
the consciousness of God and from the sense of 
accountability in any way relieve life of pressure 
or effect for it any escape from the necessity of 
service. All it does is to substitute an impersonal 
for a personal master. Instead of postulating at 
the centre of things a mind that thinks and plans 


34 THE THRESHOLD 


for us, and a heart that feels and loves, it en- 
thrones cold, dead, unfeeling law. It deifies a 
blind force moving relentlessly in all realms, for- 
giving no transgressions, overlooking no mistakes, 
making no distinction between inadvertence and 
intent—a force that can neither be touched to 
compassion nor moved by prayer. This is the 
ideal world which the counsel of the ungodly 
creates for itself and in which, let it be noted, they 
do not escape service, but merely change masters, . 
renouncing allegiance to the law of love in order 
to live their lives under the lash of law. ‘This is 
the grim irony of the situation, that whereas this 
course has been adopted by the ungodly for the 
express purpose of escaping from authority, they 
find themselves in the clutch of a more adaman- 
tine system still, where nothing but the most re- 
lentless authority meets and masters them at every 
step, where law is never tempered by grace, justice 
never mitigated by mercy and the Nemesis of | 


) 
—_ 


retribution is forever on their trail. 

To walk in such counsel is to cut life away 
from its only adequate sanction and support, 
emptying it of all those contents that refuse to 
be classified as merely material actions and re- 
actions. It is a theory which to be logical must 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 35 


do violence to the deepest intuitions and give the 
lie to 


“Those mighty hopes that make us men.” 


It repudiates the imperatives of duty and reduces 
responsibility to a fancy-fed figment of the imag- 
ination—an imposition, in short, practised by 
the knowing ones upon the simple, and putting 
a weapon into the hands of knaves by which to 
secure the obedience of fools. 

Now, the trouble with all this is, that it cannot 
be held as a theory, without tending irresistibly 
to work out in practice. It is this inevitableness 
that was so clear to the Psalmist’s mind. He 
could see that the man who walked in the counsel 
of the ungodly and adopted an ideal of life and 
conduct which deliberately excluded the thought 
of God, would speedily make his outer world of 
conduct correspond with his inner life of thought. 
There is always an interaction, conscious or un- 
conscious, going on between belief and behaviour, 
between creed and conduct. It is really the law 
which we find at work everywhere in nature mak- 
ing for balance. The keel of a ship cleaves a 
furrow in the deep, but the surrounding waters 
rush in to restore the level. The rarefied air 


26 THE THRESHOLD 


rises from the lighted candle and the cool air 
flows in to take its place. Your hand grasps the 
cold metal of the door handle, but its coolness and 
your warmth come to 4 mean temperature. So it 
is in the world of thought and action. ‘There is 
always a tendency to equilibrium, and when a 
man refuses to bring his conduct up to the level 
of his creed, he invariably sets about reducing his 
creed to the level of his conduct. This is ever the 
history of theoretical ungodliness and if our analy- 
sis be correct, behind this bad counsel referred 
to in our Psalm, there was a history of moral de- 
fection of which it was the result. The belief 
in God is part of a man’s mental and moral make- 
up. It is something which he starts out with as his 
natural equipment, the portion of goods that falls 
to him by right of inheritance, his original stock- 
in-trade. The tendency of the race has never 
been to atheism but rather to polytheism. It may 
be safely said that men do not become atheists 
by nature but by art, and by an art that is at 
perpetual quarrel with nature. Atheism is seldom 
mental, so seldom, indeed, as to be a negligible 
quantity. It is mostly moral. It is the miasma 
that rises from what the Apostle calls “an evil 
heart of unbelief’ to cloud the mind and confuse 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 37 


the judgment. It results in developing a personal 
equation which both violates the faculty of moral 
discrimination and weakens the power of moral 
determination. This is what Paul meant when 
he wrote, ‘“‘Because they refused to have God in 
their knowledge, God gave them up unto a rep- 
robate mind to do those things which are not 
fitting.” Similarly it is written “The fool hath 
said in his heart, there is no God,” the fact being 
that he said it because he was a fool—a de-men- 
talised, through being a demoralised man. The 
word translated “fool” suggests this. It is de- 
rived from the Hebrew word “to wither.” It is 
the man whose faculty for God has withered and 
died down through neglect, who presumes to deny 
the divine existence. His verdict is as valuable 
as that of a withered optic nerve on the question 
of light. It is a confounding of God’s objective 
reality with man’s subjective ability to discern 
Him, as though the existence of God depended 
upon its recognition by man. Denial of God, or 
even a cherished doubt as to His being and claims, 
necessarily reacts on character. It lays an axe at 
the roots of law and order, for all earthly author- 
ity can enforce itself only as it is recognised as 
deriving itself from the higher authority of the 


38 THE THRESHOLD 


skies. Puta note of interrogation after the latter 
and straightway everything in the former is at a 
loose end. Is not this precisely the condition of 
things prevailing to-day? Irresponsibility is in 
the very air. There is a general lowering of 
standards and flouting of authority, a contempt 
for law and an impatience of restriction, a resent- 
ment of restraint resulting in an all-round dete- 
rioration of character and conduct. This is not a 
pulpit Jeremiad. It is a public press opinion, 
calmly reasoned and expressed with no particular 
bias of any theological kind. Take the following 
from the ‘New York Times” of recent date, and 
let the United States government ask itself 
whether, if it requires moral decency and self- 
control on the part of its citizens, it ought not to 
make proper provision for moral and religious 
teaching with adequate sanctions in its schools: 


“Not only are crime conditions throughout the 
nation worse than they have been in three decades, 
but Eastern cities are threatened with a still 
greater increase in crimes of violence by bands of 
Western criminals who are headed eastward, hav- 
ing been foiled in the West by vigilance com- 
mittees, according to a statement issued yesterday 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 39 


by William B. Joyce, Chairman of the National 
Surety Company. 

“Mr. Joyce, who has studied crime conditions 
throughout his thirty-five years’ connection with 
the surety company, said that never in the history 
of that company had its losses been greater in 
ratio and number, or crimes, particularly those 
of a violent character, more numerous than they 
are now. He issued his statement, he said, as a 
warning to the police to prepare for the influx of 
Western criminals, and, while he did not think it 
necessary to form vigilance committees here just 
yet, he expressed the opinion that it ‘may come 
to that.’ 

“* Something must be done and done quickly,’ 
said Mr. Joyce. “Ihe National Crime Commis- 
sion could, of course, be of great help, but it is 
hardly organised and in working order as yet, 
and we need quick protection. In all my experi- 
ence with crime I have never seen anything even 
approaching crime conditions as they are in the 
United States to-day.’ 

“Mr. Joyce intimated it might soon become 
necessary to get together in this city a corps of 
expert marksmen to combat the horde of Western 
criminals he believes are on their way here. Asked 


40 THE THRESHOLD 


why he felt sure the criminals were eastward 
bound, Mr. Joyce said: 

“ ‘Criminals will not go to work and when cer- 
tain localities are made too hot for them they 
simply pack up and move on elsewhere where the 
picking is easier. Of course, we in the Eastern 
States have well organised bodies of police, but 
most of these bank crimes are committed by ex- 
perienced men of a most desperate character who 
must be dealt with on the spot. In many instances 
before the police can be notified such robbers 
have done their work and made their escape.’ ” 


There can be no national stability apart from 
morality. There can be no permanent morality 
apart from religion and there can be no adequate 
authority for religion apart from the revealed will 
of God. The Bible is the children’s birthright 
and it is only as its vital and vitalising truths are 
incorporated in our family, our social, our politi- 
cal and our industrial life that the national pulse 
can beat strong or the tide of our life run high. 

Belief in God and in His Son, Jesus Christ, 
with all that belief connotes, is the first grand 
necessity for national security. Not a mere men- 
tal assent to these things as intellectual proposi- 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 41 


tions, but moral consent to their claims. This 
alone can gird us with the courage to dare and 
the strength to endure. To profess our belief 
in God merely as an intellectual proposition, 
while we withhold from Him our allegiance, is to 
put our conduct at quarrel with our creed and to 
play the fool. This is to be an “atheist” in the 
New Testament sense of the word. It is to be 
“without God and without hope in the world.” 
Even the heathen who have never known His 
Name, but are loyal to the light they have are 
in a better case. Condemnation by God is not 
going to set in on any man’s failure to subscribe 
intellectually to this or that set of doctrinal be- 
liefs. It will not turn even on his believing every- 
thing contained in the Scriptures, but on his 
loyalty to the best he knows, whether revealed 
from within or without. The supreme question” 
for each one of us is, do we respond to that best 
whenever we meet it, whether in picture, in 
poetry, in prose or in personality? If we do, if 
we acknowledge the claim of the Highest, when 
that Highest is revealed, if we uncover in its pres- 
ence, if we prostrate ourselves before it and con- 
fess it as divine, if we give ourselves up to it, body, 
soul and spirit, to be ruled by it at all times, in 


42 THE THRESHOLD © 


all places and to all issues, then and then only are 
we justified; while to oppose that, to disobey that, 
even to ignore that, 1s to stand irrevocably con- 
demned. God has built into the structure of 
every man’s constitution, the eternal standards 
of truth and righteousness. We carry about with 
us wherever we go, an indestructible revelation 
of the divine. We may resent it, resist it, abuse 
and violate it by all ignoble use, but there it 
stands, calm and insistent, a living and luminous 
witness to God and duty. However mistaken 
men’s opinions may be about right and wrong, 
and however different their interpretations of the 
inner voice which is to them the voice of God, if 
there be the will to do His will and to follow 
the gleam, it will be counted to them for right- 
eousness, and upon all such will be bestowed the 
freedom of the City of God. 

Now, Jesus Christ is the focal point where all 
the rays of revealed truth, whether in prophecy, 
or psalm, or personality, meet and find their con- 
centrated radiance. To know Him, to under- 
stand Him, to love Him with all the heart and 
soul and mind and strength, this is the supreme 
blessedness that gladdens time, gives meaning to 
life and glorifies eternity. 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 43 


We have already seen that ungodliness is the 
starting point of sin. It is the negative condition 
which resolves itself by an evil logic into an 
attitude of positive hostility to God and His 
claims. It is impatience of restraint, breaking 
bounds and passing into actual transgression. It 
might be asked “Is not the man already a sinner 
who has taken up the mental and moral attitude 
involved in the term ‘ungodliness’ and is it not 
somewhat fanciful for the Psalmist to set up a 
distinction between the two, by making the second 
appear as an advance on the first?” There can 
be no question that he does suggest a gradation 
between “ungodly” and “sinners” and ‘‘scornful” 
and if there were any doubt about it, it would be 
dispelled by the unmistakable gradation in the 
verbs “walketh,” ‘“‘standeth,”’ “‘sitteth.” The 
more we look into this passage the deeper grows 
the conviction that the word “sinners”? must be 
construed in corporate terms. The whole trend 
of the Psalmist’s thought seems to show that the 
sinfulness here referred to does not relate merely 
to individual transgression—some sudden lapse 
from virtue in some black hour of temptation and 
as suddenly revolted from with loathing and self- 
disgust. We are compelled to construe the situa- 


44. THE THRESHOLD 


tion through the word “counsel” which we have 
already seen as controlling the interpretation of 
ungodliness. This makes it the result of a delib- 
erate policy adopted after calm discussion and 
cool calculation of cost. This gives quite a differ- 
ent aspect to the term and compels us to regard the 
position thus taken up as one of organised rebel- 
lion on the part of a corporate body. The picture 
suggested is that of the ungodly man coming out 
of the deliberative assembly in company with 
other kindred souls who have ruled God out of 
their creed, and with whom he is now prepared to 
stand in, for the purpose of giving practical effect 
to the negation of God upon which they have 
collectively resolved. Now sin, thus considered 
as a definite policy of moral disruption, adopted 
by those who join hand in hand to work unright- 
eousness, 1s a very much more difficult and com- 
plex problem with which to deal than that of 
mere personal deviation. 

Here is a vitiated atmosphere with which to 
cope, corrupted standards with which to reckon, 
and a sinister esprét-de-cor ps to be faced, generated 
by evil association under that lawless spirit which 
has wrought itself into the moral history of the 
race and turned its Edens into burnt and barren 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 45 


wastes. ‘It is the spirit of disobedience, not only 
become incarnate in individual lives, but organis- 
ing those lives into societies, institutions and com- 
bines, established for the set purpose of under- 
mining authority, contaminating conscience and 
generally polluting the springs of personal, 
domestic, industrial and national life. The Day 
of Pentecost, with its baptism of purifying power 
has thus its evil counterpart in a Devil’s pentecost 
in which his disciples, wrought into one accord 
under his malign influence, become baptised with 
his spirit and inspired to work their deeds of social 
wreckage and incendiary hate. 

The sooner the Christian church wakes up to 
the fact of this menacing combine, the sooner will 
she realise the necessity for ending her quarrels, 
healing her divisions and closing her ranks. This 
evil confederation is everywhere gathering in 
force. We have infinitely more to fear from it 
than from the peril of war. It was this, indeed, 
in the late world-struggle that weakened our arms 
in the hour of battle and postponed the day of 
peace. Even if the Allies had gone down in the 
late war, their honour would have gone up. But 
if we go down, slain by our drunkenness and un- 
cleanness, then our honour will perish, our memory 


46 THE THRESHOLD 


will rot and our glory be trodden in the dust. 
Let every one of us be warned against associa- 
tion or complicity with any club, guild or frater- 
nity that exalts itself against God, that organises 
itself against Jesus Christ or repudiates His 
claims. 

There is a widely spread and highly organised 
socialistic system that has its home in Europe but 
is becoming naturalised throughout the world. It 
is a system conceived in antagonism to Christian- 
ity and framed with the deliberate intention of 
defeating the aims of Christ and His church. The 
ideals that are thus repudiated by this extreme 
socialistic school are those that have created the 
freedom, the civilisation, the intellectual life and 
all the most potent forces that have been making 
for the elevation and betterment of mankind. 
The literature of this school floods the markets 
and is lowering all the standards of decent living. 
Its propaganda is a disintegrating element which, 
unless counteracted, will lay our western civilisa- 
tion in the dust. What kind of a system must 
that be which requires from its supporters as a 
condition of their enrolment, the denial of God 
and repudiation of Christ? Does any working- 
man for a moment dream that his emancipation 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 47 


can come by turning his back on that Christ who 
lived and loved and laboured and suffered and 
died to make men brothers the whole world 
round ? 

Professor Hudson, the American historian of 
the Renascence, has shown that this great move- 
ment was the emancipation of the individual from 
ecclesiastical fetters. He points out that it was 
initiated by the workingmen of Florence. In 
that busy industrial centre, it awoke and gathered 
itself up in mighty power. It was the working- 
man of that age who threw off the monstrous 
tyranny of ecclesiasticism which, like Sindbad’s 
“old man of the sea,” had bestridden and was 
threatening to strangle the life of the world. It 
was the workingman who struck a blow from 
which that tyranny is staggering to-day. But 
is the workingman going back into serfdom 
again? Can he not see that the anti-Christian 
socialism which seeks to disciple him, must prove 
fatal to the true development of the individual 
because it is the supreme expression of despotism ? 
It appeals to the independence of the working- 
man, only to coerce him into a slavery as debas- 
ing in its effects as it is brutal and unreasoning 
in its methods. Under its iron heel he is bruised 


48 THE THRESHOLD 


into anonymity. He must not dare to act out 
his own true self. He must be part of a great 
industrial machine and a standardised part at 
that, with no individuality. He must not do his 
best in the matter of work, but must move at 
the pace prescribed by the controllers of the ma- 
chine. He must’ stultify himself and violate his 
own self-respect by becoming the mere creature 
of another’s will, the instrument of a force that 
robs him of the right of self-expression. Thus 
the so-called labour-movement of our day is in 
peril of being exploited by public agitators for 
private ends. What might become an untold 
power for goodness, if directed by godly men 
and baptised into the spirit of Christ, will, if con- 
trolled by the spirit of a Marx or a Moses Baritz, 
become a self-destroying force that, if allowed 
to work unhindered, will undo the work of cen- 
turies and turn all the dearly bought gains of the 
working classes to dust and ashes in their hands. 

As to how far the Christian church herself is 
responsible for these reactions against her, 
through failure to present a full-orbed Gospel, 
might very profitably be considered. Much of the 
modern teaching in certain schools of socialistic 
thought, owes all that is best in it to the teachings 


NOR STANDETH IN THE WAY OF SINNERS 49 


of Christ and His Apostles. Were it not for the 
atmosphere of freedom and tolerance, of sweet- 
ness and light generated by centuries of Christian 
teaching, they could not find the security in which 
to formulate and propagate what they are pleased 
to call their new ideals of brotherhood and better- 
ment. Whenever I hear these claims put forth, 
either within the church or outside, of having dis- 
covered a new Gospel, I am reminded of a “down- 
and-out”’ Australian who, at his wit’s end to make 
a living, claimed to have discovered a new illumi- 
nant. According to his prospectus, the electric 
light was not going to get a look-in, while as 
for ordinary gas, it would be associated in the 
mind with the dark ages of the world. He gave 
a demonstration first of all before a number of 
the elect, consisting of supernumerary ministers 
who are always ready to invest loose cash in any 
wild-cat scheme that promises quick and fabulous 
returns. They came, they saw and were ensnared. 
They read their Bibles, so to speak, by the aid of 
this new light and straightway parted with their 
money and took up their shares. Before launch- 
ing his project on a clamorous public, however, 
the promoter felt it would be well to rope in a 
number of wealthy laymen of the church. Among 


50 THE THRESHOLD 


those who responded was the chief officer in my 
own church, a shrewd, hard-headed but humor- 
ous North of Ireland man. The demonstration 
was in progress when he arrived and he imme- 
diately drew attention to the amount of smell and 
smoke with which it was attended. This, the 
inventor explainéd, was due to the crude con- 
ditions under which he had been compelled to 
work, but which would all disappear with the 
erection of the perfect and permanent plant. As 
the demonstration continued, my friend observed 
a pipe entering the gasometer which appeared to 
have no connection with the retort. He followed 
the track of this pipe into another room, where 
he observed it ran into the metre of the local gas 
company, the tap of which was full on. Not 
thinking, of course, that if he turned it off 
it would make any difference to the demonstra- 
tion in the next room, he did so, whereupon there 
was total darkness in a few moments and great 
consternation, coupled with the sudden disappear- 
ance of the demonstrator. On investigation, it 
was found that all the illumination was coming 
from the local company’s supplies and that only 
the “smoke” and the “smell” were being supplied 
by the alleged inventor. “Which things are an 


ee | 


allegory’! 


Ill 
The Seat of the Scornful 


We now pass to the study of a yet lower deep 
of moral descent than that indicated by the word 
sinners, viz., the “‘scornful.”” Grade by descending 
grade, the degeneration deepens till a condition 
is reached in which the unhappy soul has not only 
cut itself off from divine re-inforcement, like the 
“ungodly,” nor been lured into an evil combine 
like the “sinners,’’ but has taken up a settled 
attitude with the “scornful” who scoff at good- 
ness, make a jest of religion and turn to ridicule 
the most deeply sacred things of life. It is a 
mood of flippant irresponsibility which refuses 
to be in earnest—the temper of the trifler that 
takes nothing seriously but regards life and all 
its sanctities as a mere farce, on which after be- 
ing played out, death rings down the curtain and 
clears the stage. He who descends to this depth 
has not merely broken with goodness, he discounts 
it, derides it, denies indeed its real existence, and 
mockingly defiles the fair fame of such as have 

51 


52 THE THRESHOLD 


kept their garments white and clean. Unpre- 
pared to purge himself that he may rank with 
them, he besmirches them that they may seem to 
rank with him. Only thus can a creature so splen- 
didly endowed as man reconcile himself to a proc- 
ess of moral decline. He takes the devil’s own de- 
light in a good man’s fall. If he cannot justify 
himself, he will find at least some compensation 
in condemning others and proving, to his own 
satisfaction at any rate, that he is no worse than 
his neighbours, the only difference being that he 
makes no profession of godliness and they do. He 
cynically declares that he has no use for religious 
people, and welcomes every colourable pretext 
for indulging in the sneer, as compendious as it 
is contemptible, that every man has his price; 
that virtue is merely an affectation; that honesty 
is a pretence and human goodness nothing but a 
name. Now it is one thing for a man to take up 
this extreme position out of disappointment and 
disillusion, as a result of having been victimised 
by some pretender who has employed a profession 
of godliness for the purpose of gaining a confi- 
dence which he has betrayed. It is quite another 
thing, however, to have evolved to this stage from 
within and as a result of one’s own moral dete- 


THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL 53 


rioration and decay. The one is a healthy recoil 
from hypocrisy, under the influence of which the 
victim is naturally and for a time suspicious of 
all religious profession and ready to conclude all 
men liars and knaves, with church members at 
the bottom of the scale. But from this attitude, 
the healthy moral nature speedily reacts. It finds 
too much real goodness in the world to render 
such an extreme position permanently tenable. 
Moreover, to such a soul the unmasking of pre- 
tence comes as a shock, hurtful as it is hateful, 
and no one is more thankful than he to have his 
hurt healed and his confidence in human nature 
restored. 

Not so, however, with the class under discus- 
sion. Instead of unmasking badness, they are 
more concerned with defacing goodness, casting 
the shade of suspicion across the fairest reputa- 
tions, chuckling suggestively at every mention 
of honour, curling a contemptuous lip when fidel- 
ity is praised, holding duty in derision and God in 
defiance, despising authority and flouting law. 

Now once a man sits down in such company 
as this, he becomes a dweller in a morally infected 
area, and in turn a centre of contagion. ‘There 
must have been some such thought in the minds of 


54 THE THRESHOLD 


the scholars to whom we owe the Septuagint or 
Greek version of these Hebrew Scriptures. As you 
will remember, this translation was made about 
two hundred and fifty years before Christ, by 
seventy learned men who met for the purpose at 
Alexandria. It was done because Greek, in all 
countries surrounding the Mediterranean, had be- 
come the prevailing tongue. Inasmuch as the 
Jews had become scattered everywhere through- 
out the great commercial centres of the world, 
thus making it difficult, if not impossible, to keep 
up their knowledge and use of the Hebrew tongue, 
they were thus put in possession of their Scrip- 
tures in what had become a universal language. 
I refer to this because in the attempt of these 
scholars to translate the Hebrew word for “scorn- 
ful” into its Greek equivalent, they have rendered 
it by a word which means “plague” or “pesti- 
ience.” From this it is clear that it was the 
baleful influence of this class upon which the 
emphasis is sought to be placed. The scornful 
company was a plague-stricken centre, a tainted 
atmosphere, an infected area, in breathing which 
aman ran the risk of contracting a deadly moral 
disease. Now, apart altogether from any question 
as to the accuracy of this translation, there can be 


THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL 55 


no possible doubt as to the accuracy of the diag- 
nosis. Whatever comparative philology may have 
to say about it, sound psychology confirms it as 
indisputably true. The spirit of the scorner 
breeds contagion, and here again let it be pointed 
out that it is not the scornful as an individual 
that is being designated, but as a class and in con- 
cert. It is the plural that is employed in each of 
these descriptions and this is deeply significant. 
We have seen how the terms “ungodly” and “sin- 
ners’ were both controlled by the idea expressed 
in the word “counsel,” in the sense that in each 
case 1t was a reasoned policy that had been 
adopted after due deliberation and not some insur- 
gent impulse, acted upon under the stress of a 
sudden temptation. This is still further sought to 
be conveyed by the use of the word “way” in rela- 
tion to sinners and which means here a deliberately 
chosen course of action or manner of life. Again 
it is further suggested by the word “‘seat”’ in rela- 
tion to the scornful—a term which carries the idea 
of a session or conclave, such as we express in the 
phrase “‘seat of government.” It is a body of 
men so given over to the power and practice of 
evil that they meet in concert to express their 
contempt of God and their derision of His laws. 


56 THE THRESHOLD 


Now this kind of thing, of necessity, becomes 
creative of atmosphere. It generates a poisonous 
gas which permeates and infects every depart- 
ment of conduct, every relationship of life. 
When the great basic truths and convictions 
of life are ridiculed—when a man’s deepest obli- 
gations are held-up to scorn—when conscience is 
laughed out of court as obsolete, and all high 
sentiment is treated with contempt, there sets in 
a general rot, an all-round deterioration of char- 
acter and conduct which propagates itself by an 
inevitable law. To sit in such company is to 
breathe a vitiated air, whose moral toxine enters 
into the very blood and poisons all the springs of 
life. Like some malignant growth in the indi- 
vidual body, it is not content with quiescence, it 
must become active and aggressive. Just as a 
cancer lays infecting fingers on contiguous healthy 
cells and corrupts them, so this disease centre in 
the body social seeks to break down healthy moral 
tissue in its vicinity till the corporate faith and 
hope and love are smitten with its rottenness and 
the very faculty for God and goodness becomes 
impaired. Clearly then, it must have been this 
inevitable tendency which suggested to the trans- 
lators of the Septuagint the idea of construing 


THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL 57 


the Hebrew word for ‘‘scornful” into the terms 
of a contagious bodily disease. It makes a star- 
tling picture. A seat of contagion! Who would 
wittingly or willingly occupy a seat in the com- 
pany of men infected with smallpox or bubonic 
plague? Yet this would be but a trifling risk 
compared with that incurred by association with 
the type that is here described. For here is an 
atmosphere not only exhausted of God and good- 
ness, but positively charged with their moral 
opposites—an atmosphere miuasmic, mephitic, 
which smites the soul that breathes it with 
paralysis of all its higher powers. 

The sense of rapturous wonder, the spirit of 
reverence, the instinct of worship, the feeling of 
awe that hushes the voices of time and floods the 
inner sanctities with the music of another and a 
higher world—these all wither and die down 
where the air is full of mocking and the crackling 
laughter of fools. The spirit of mocking and the 
spirit of reverence can never coexist. They are 
mutually exclusive. But reverence is the root 
principle of all that is truest and best in individual 
and national life. It supplies law with its sanc- 
tion and love with its appropriate soil. Where 
there is no reverence, law becomes a futility and 


58 THE THRESHOLD 


it is only as love is deeply rooted in reverence that 
it can keep its virgin purity and strength. A life 
that is defiant of law, defective in duty and defi- 
cient of love through want of reverence for the 
supreme, becomes a mockery to itself and a men- 
ace to the state. 

Apart altogether from any religious or other- 
world consideration, the scornful mood stands con- 
demned. It cheapens life by emptying it of its 
moral contents. It lowers a man’s value as a 
mere working force here and now. On the plane 
of earth and time, a man does not count for as 
much, who cherishes the mocking mood. People 
decline to take him seriously, who takes all things 
as ajest. The spirit of raillery and scorn runs to 
earth all the currents of fine sentiment; it coarsens 
the fibre. Your finely grained man never scofts. 
He never sneers at anothers faith, however 
grotesque and rudimentary that faith may be. He 
will tread the floor of a Mohammedan mosque, 
a Buddhist temple, or a Chinese Joss-house with 
as reverent a spirit as he will uncover in West- 
minster Abbey or St. Paul’s. 

Better be the most degraded dirt-eating negro 
that ever worshipped a fetish, than the man who 
would laugh at him for doing it. That fetish 


THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL $9 


represents the best and highest the worshipper 
knows, and in any case we are not likely to con- 
vince him of the superiority of our faith, if it 
prompts or even permits us to ridicule his. 

By holding all things, even the most sacred, up 
to ridicule, it puts man at quarrel with the nature 
of things. Nothing could be more out of harmony 
with the spirit of the universe than flippancy. 
Nature is keyed to the note of seriousness and she 
has no time for the scoffer. He that would enter 
into her secrets must approach her with reverent 
mind, with meek and lowly heart. To chatter 
trifles in her presence, is to seal her lips. We 
must keep silence before her if we would listen 
to her voice. Only to those who revere, those 
who come to her in the spirit of deep and earnest 
enquiry will she unveil her mysteries, so that to 
know the blessedness of discovery even in the 
realm of nature, men must hold their peace and 
bow the knee. When, however, other-world con- 
siderations are brought into account, and the 
thoughts and feelings of men are viewed in the 
white radiance of that light which beats from 
eternity on all the things of time, it becomes 
startlingly clear how far from the blessed life is 
the course of the scorner, whose footsteps we have 


60 THE THRESHOLD 


traced. It is a course that runs counter to all 
that is deepest and truest in human consciousness. 
It has to keep up a perpetual feud with the innate 
desire for God, which has been wrought into the 
very warp and woof of our mental and moral 
being. A man, to have reached the stage we have 
been describing, must not only have torn himself 
in twain, but have flung away his nobler part. 
But though a man may thus effect a temporary 
division of himself and take sides with his lower 
as against his higher self, he cannot be at peace. 
Here is no path to blessedness, but rather a swift 
and sloping passage to the dead-end of despair. 
But, paradoxical as it may appear, in this very 
despair lies the one and only hope of the scorner’s 
reaction and return to God. The fact is that the 
higher side of man’s nature, though discredited, 
dishonoured and discrowned, never renounces its 
right to reign. It never takes its dethronement 
lying done. It bides its time for it knows its 
hour will come. It can afford to wait for the 
moment of disillusionment, when the sceptre will 
again pass into its hand. It has memories of God 
and associations with goodness which are inwoven 
with the very fibres of heart and brain. It has 
a moral inheritance in the way of divine inten- 


THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL 61 


tion and holy impulse, whose life history runs 
back through all the generations to their source 
and fount in the mind and heart of God. Because 
of this, because a man can never disinherit himself 
of his moral instincts and demands, he can find no 
permanent peace when these are violated or 
ignored. 

There never can be any blessedness when life is 
divided against itself, and godliness is the only 
way by which it can be unified. It is the only 
thing that provides for the all-round correspond- 
ence of man with his complete and completing 
environment, human and divine. That is only 
a narrow and impoverished interpretation of the 
godly life which regards it as concerned merely 
with its obligations to the Father in Heaven and 
forgets its relation to the duties of earth and time. 
Godliness is a term that covers the whole field of 
duty, secular and sacred, personal and domestic, 
literary and scientific, professional and political, 
commercial and industrial; in fact, everything 
that relates to our complete and many-sided life. 
Any narrower view of religion dishonours God 
and by so much discredits man. It is because so 
many teachers have thus impoverished the idea 
of godliness by restricting its function and field 


62 THE THRESHOLD 


to another world, that they have unwittingly 
played into the hands of the scoffer and driven 
men into his ranks. Then again, by their incon- 
sistency of life, many professedly godly men have 
helped to multiply the scorner type. Paul pointed 
out in his day that professedly religious Jews were 
bringing the nanie of God into contempt by their 
notoriously irreligious lives. ‘“Ihe name of God 
is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you.” 
The world is justifiably suspicious of men whose 
religion expends itself in pious expletives and 
has no energy left to pay its debts, or of those 
who seek to make up for short weights by offer- 
ing long prayers. But this does not justify scoff- 
ing at religion itself. If it could be shown that a 
man’s religion sanctioned his inconsistencies and 
condoned his offences, it would be quite another 
matter. But this is a little task that I do not 
remember having been undertaken by the most 
blatant unbelief. As a matter of fact, if a man 
were out to make an attack on hypocrisy and 
wished to point his arrows with the sharpest 
epithets, he would have to borrow the language 
of Jesus or Paul. The inconsistencies of Chris- 
tian professors, and God knows there are none of 
us who can claim immunity, give the scorner no 


THE SEAT OF THE SCORNFUL 63 


excuse for scoffing at the Christian faith. He 
might as well scoff at magnetism because he had 
been fooled by the deflection of a compass, or 
sneer at a plumb-line because of walls that are 
built out of true, as rail at God and religion be- 
cause of the insincere. The eternal standards of 
truth and righteousness remain, however false 
men may prove to them. And it is with these 
standards and not with their defective human 
exponents that we have each to deal. 

For all his mocking mood, however, there must 
come moments when the mind of the scorner gets 
turned inward on itself and he is made aware 
that he is playing false to the best he knows. It 
is this consciousness, forced upon him in his better 
moments by the Spirit of truth, that he is violat- 
ing his higher nature, desecrating the holy of 
holies within his breast, and stifling the “still 
small voice,” that makes the inner life of the 
scorer a troubled sea, casting up mire and dirt. 
It is really this reflex result on moral character 
that is so appalling, and it is this with which the 
Psalmist is concerned. Let us be warned against 
catching this spirit, for it spreads by a swift con- 
tagion from almost unconscious beginnings. It is 
so easy to get into the way of jesting about sacred 


64 THE THRESHOLD 


things. We mean no harm, but the tendency 
grows from more to more by insensible degrees 
till, unless corrected, it vulgarises all we touch. 
The seat of the scorner is reached by such very 
easy grades that our author would arrest us at the 
start with his warning word, which may well be 
taken as the keynote of our Psalm and para- 
phrased into ‘‘Ponder the path of your feet.” 


IV 


But His Delight Is in the Law of 
the Lord 


The Psalmist here passes from the negative to 
the positive side of the blessed life. Up till now 
it has been simply a catalogue of negatives. Of 
course, it is a great thing for a man to refrain 
from evil practices, but unless his life finds posi- 
tive expression in active service, playing out its 
potencies into the field of human relations, it 
remains an unfulfilled prophecy, an arrested 
development, a self-centred and thereby a dead- 
centred force. ‘The demand is for righteousness 
and no number of self-imposed restraints, though 
we might multiply them a million-fold, could 
fill the bill. Mere abstinence from evil, however ,_ 
total or continuous, will not get life anywhere. 
Better that it should break bounds and go wrong 
than do nothing and go nowhere. Every one who 
has had to do with rescue work will agree that 
there is far more hope in dealing with a life 


strongly heading in a wrong direction than with 
65 


66 THE THRESHOLD 


one that is at a standstill, or drifting like a rud- 
derless craft and without any propelling power 
upon the waters of time. 

Life that is denied expression will “grow in,” 
as it cannot grow out, and achieve its own defeat. 
Like the power of a coiled-up spring, its forces, 
unless liberated and expended in work, will lose 
their elasticity and die down into inertia. Energy 
must find expression and religion is not a system 
for the binding back of power, but for the loosen- 
ing of it and letting it go. The godly life is the 
God-like life but the life of God is forever articu- 
lating itself in myriad forms of beauty and 
utility. All nature is simply a breaking forth into 
expression of His mind and heart. The Spirit of 
the universe becomes vocal in wind and wave, 
in murmuring brook and singing bird. Every- 
where it seems to come to manifestation. The 
advancing and retreating seasons, the great march- 
past of the starry hosts across the field of night, 
the storm king pelting the earth with hail, shatter- 
ing the air with thunder and writing his creden- 
tials in lightning letters across the bosom of the 
cloud; the tenderness of the dawn, the gold and 
crimson splendour of the dying day—these and 
ten thousand sights and sounds are the visions 


THE LAW OF THE LORD 67 


and voices of a God who is everywhere and always 
unveiling himself and desiring to be known. God- 
liness provides life with a field that is a perpetual 
challenge to its powers. Here are undiscovered 
regions that beckon the explorer and an arena 
for the display of heroic endurance and achieve- 
ment with which nothing else in the whole world 
can compare. Courage, enterprise, initiative, in- 
vention, patience, self-sacrifice, everything that 
the mind can crave, or the heart can love, or the 
spirit of adventure desire, can find its fitting field 
for the fullest functioning of its powers in the 
freedom of a godly life. It is a life that com- 
mandeers every quality of hand and heart and 
brain, yokes up all the forces of body, soul and 
spirit, takes up every moment of time and every 
ounce of energy that it may turn them all outward 
in terms of sacrificial service, while at the same 
time it acts reflexively on personal character 
within and lifts it to its highest power. Here 
then, is a majestic and positive life, full of force 
-and freshness, to which we are beckoned and 
which is as far removed from the stagnation of 
monastic repression as are the mighty tides of 
ocean from the lazy-locked lagoon. 

The godly man is the man in whose personality 


68 THE THRESHOLD 


the will of God becomes so instituted and organ- 
ised as to find for itself working expression through 
all his functions. In Paul’s phrase, “his mem- 
bers are yielded to God as instruments of right- 
eousness.” Righteousness, in the sense of moral 
energy, operating through human instrumentation, 
is the active forcé upon which God relies for the 
extension of His Kingdom. It is the “law of the 
spirit of life in Christ Jesus’ not merely exerting 
itself inwardly and freeing the individual from 
the “law of sin and death,” but reacting out- 
wardly in the way of moral and social reconstruc- 
tion, on the kingdom of men. 

The presence of such a man is as pungent, as 
penetrative, as pervasive in its saving energy as 
salt. He is not merely saved but saving, not only 
pure but purifying. He creates an atmosphere 
of moral ozone. His coming into any circle is a 
quickening breath, like a fresh breeze from the sea 
on a sultry day. Even the servants of the house 
do their work better when such a radiant per- 
sonality is around. 

The story is told of Thomas Cook, the great 
English evangelist, that on one occasion when he 
was about to conduct a mission in a certain town, 
great preparation for his coming was made in the 


THE LAW OF THE LORD 69 


home where he was to be an honoured guest. 
During these days, one of the maids of the house 
came somewhat flustered into the shop of the 
family butcher in order to make a purchase. The 
salesman, noticing that she was a bit put out, 
asked the reason, to which she petulantly replied, 
“Oh, one would think that the Lord Jesus Christ 
Himself was coming to stay with us, there is 
such a fuss being made!’ Mr. Cook came and 
stayed and went. A day or two after he had gone, 
the maid found herself once more at the butcher’s 
counter. Looking at the salesman she said, “You 
remember I told you that from the fuss that was 
being made, you might have thought that the 
Lord Jesus Christ was coming to our house?” “TI 
do,” said the salesman. ‘Well,’ said the girl, 
eite's been!” 

Such a life becomes the radiant centre of sweet 
and wholesome forces which stream forth from a 
heart in which God sits enthroned and from which 
wave after wave of health-giving energy pours, to 
comfort the sad, to reinforce the weak and to 
heal the broken in heart. This is infinitely more 
than mere blamelessness or subjective righteous- 
ness. It is powerfully objective. It is upright- 
ness in action “‘with seed in itself after its kind.” 


7O THE THRESHOLD 


It is reproductive of its own species. It differs 
immeasurably from uprightness as a mere passive 
quality. 

A stone pillar may be upright and by its up- 
rightness may reveal the deviation from the per- 
pendicular of other pillars in the vicinity. But 
that is the extent of its power. It can do nothing 
to correct their deviation from the vertical. But 
a righteous life works rectifyingly on other lives. 
It makes for uprightness. It is not merely a 
rebuke, but an inspiration. It is recorded of 
Goethe that when he saw the Venus de Milo for 
the first time and beheld its matchless grace, he 
burst into tears and cried “She has no arms?” 
But the matchless grace of the ideal righteousness 
has got arms, and they are outstretched in Jesus 
Christ to draw us near. 

To gain the true inwardness of this verse, we 
must push behind this word “law” and endeavour 
to reach the essential idea it is employed to ex- 
press. Otherwise we shall be hard pressed to 
account for such a strong term as “delight” being 
selected by the Psalmist to set forth his feeling in 
regard to what is commonly construed as a cold 
statute in the way of prohibition or command. 
Rightly interpreted “the law of the Lord” with- 


THE LAW OF THE LORD 71 


out and in statute form, is a ringing challenge to 
ga, great adventure for the recovery of lost treas- 
ure and alienated possessions. Written within, it 
is the call of the blood, the ancestral imperative 
of the original and unspoiled human nature, the 
homing instinct of the soul which is older than 
the fall, and which, though cast down, has not 
been destroyed. 


“Not in entire forgetfulness 
And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
From God, who is our home.” 


We have reminiscences of a lost harmony as well 
as anticipations of its restoration. In the absence 
of this inward sense of discord and incompleteness, 
the summons of the ideal righteousness, as ex- 
pressed in the moral law would have no signifi- 
cance or power of appeal. But to the normal 
man it always possesses this power. ‘This fact 
constituted the ground of Paul’s confidence in pre- 
senting the claims of the Gospel message. He 
knew always that in preaching the truth, he had 
an ally in the hearer’s own breast. “By manifes- 
tation of the truth we commend ourselves to every 
man’s conscience in the sight of God.” It is in 


72 THE THRESHOLD 


the harmonisation of life with these antiphonal 
voices—the statutory imperative from without 
and the “categorical imperative” from within— 
that the heart of man realises the rapture of re- 
stored relations, leaping with delight as it listens 
and learns and lines up with, the “Law of the 
Lord.” 

But the Law of the Lord is not merely a com- 
mand, it is a dynamic. In common usage the 
words “law” and “force” are frequently employed 
as though they were interchangeable terms. It is 
indeed very difficult to think of them apart and 
yet we have to remember that a law, as a law, 
can do nothing. What we call the laws of nature 
are simply registrations of the observed uniformity 
with which certain occurrences always follow cer- 
tain antecedent conditions. Of course, no great 
harm follows this interchangeable use of “law” 
and “force” in our discussions, as long as we do 
not fall into the error of supposing that because, 
forsooth, we have discovered the law or method 
by which God works out His sovereign purposes in 
nature, we have thereby dismissed the necessity for 
postulating the presence and working of the pers 
sonal will, of which such laws are simply the ex- 
pression and effect. The persistence, however, 


THE LAW OF THE LORD 73 


with which we keep on commuting these two 
terms, suggests that their association is a necessity 
of thought. Indeed, in his “Reign of Law” 
Argyle affirms:—‘“An observed order of facts to 
be entitled to the rank of a law, must be an order 
so constant and uniform as to indicate necessity, 
and necessity can only arise out of the action of 
some compelling force. Law, therefore, comes to 
indicate not merely an observed order of facts, 
but that order as involving the action of some 
force or forces of which nothing more may be 
known than these visible effects. So that Force is 
the root idea of Law, in its scientific sense.” 

Now if “force” can be seen and felt to be the 
“root idea” of law in its moral and spiritual sense 
as well, an immense gain in comfort and assur- 
ance will be secured. 

Here for example, is the law ‘“Thou shalt love 
the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all 
thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy 
strength.” Now if by putting ourselves in line 
with this formula we discover that instead of 
being a dead counsel of perfection, standing aloof 
and inoperative over against our lives, it is in 
itself a real “live wire, 


pg 


an electrified rail, so to 
speak, in consenting and co-operating with which 


74 THE THRESHOLD 


our wills pick up the current and become charged 
with its mighty dynamic, so that the path of right- 
eousness becomes in truth a “new and /iving way,” 
we begin to understand the Psalmist’s rapture in 
this enabling and liberating law. His delight 
then, springs not from the contemplation from 
without of a cold set of statutory regulations and 
requirements, but from the consciousness of being 
caught up and swept along by a stream of spiritual 
force running on concurrently with the regulation, 
and of which the regulation becomes the conduc- 
tor, because it is the living and empowering will 
of God. There is a bound Prometheus in every 
man—a captive angel struggling to be freed. It 
is only in the encompassing atmosphere of the 
universal Love which is law, and the universal 
law which is Love, that it can find liberation and 
space for the stroke of its mighty wing. When 
the soul of man thus finds the law of its being, it 
is at once at peace. It slips into its old-time place 
as a dislocated joint slides back into its socket 
and knows and feels itself at home. Now, it can 
work in comfort, and with the free and frictionless 
movement which perfectly adjusted relations per- 
mit. Now, it can answer every call that is made 
upon it from without or urged from within. It 


THE LAW OF THE LORD 75 


is set free from the tyranny of acquired habit and 
inherited bias, by the liberating law of love, 
whose every impulse it leaps to obey. 

When a man thus learns that the limitations of 
law are the impositions of love—that love has 
lined them out, not for the sake of hemming his 
way in with repression but of clearing his track 
for expression, it lights up the whole system with 
a new and wondrous meaning. He receives the 
freedom of the City of God. He is no longer 
tuled by restriction from without, but by inspira- 
tion from within. He has entered into and be- 
come one with that spirit which is behind and 
through all law; that Presence 


“Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man 
A motive and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought 
And rolls through all things.” 


Even the laws of the state, when rightly inter- 
preted, will be seen, not as vexing limitations, 
arbitrarily imposed for the purpose of curtailing 
one’s freedom, but as beneficent provisions for its 
enlargement and security. Workmen in mills 


76 THE THRESHOLD 


and mines, on trams and trains, are often found, 
through want of thought or lack of intelligence, 
resenting the rules and regulations that are posted 
up for the purpose of safeguarding life and limb. 
If they only reflected for a moment, they would 
see that all these warnings, precautions and re- 
strictions represent the last word in the way of 
matured experience, clever device and solicitous 
desire for the promotion of human safety and 
the preservation of human life. 

That is to say, the vital principle which 
prompts the framing and animates the adminis- 
tration of such laws is love, and once men can be 
got to grasp this truth, it must change their entire 
attitude and make them keep in step. Law thus 
construed, instead of limiting, greatly enlarges 
the freedom of one’s action. He who imagines 
that he would have more liberty if all laws were 
abrogated has not learned how to think. Let 
him act out his theory by shifting his home and 
business to a country where there are no laws and 
every man does what is right in his own eyes and 
he will mighty soon wish he were back again 
under the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack, 
with all the ordered liberties they secure, and in 
spite of the vexing restrictions which, for the 


THE LAW OF THE LORD 77 


greatest good of the greatest number, they impose. 

True blessedness, according to the Psalmist, 
lies in putting one’s self and keeping one’s self 
in the midmost stream of the Divine purpose. 
‘That purpose finds expression in His law and that 
law, as we have seen, is a living force that makes 
for righteousness. Every divine command thus 
becomes a divine pledge. The words ‘“Thou 
shalt’” are not merely an ordinance, they are a 
prophecy; for whom God commands, He enables, 
whom He commissions, He provisions, and the 
power to obey will always be found streaming 
alongside the will to obey. 

Very much of men’s resentment against the 
limitations of law would disappear if they would 
but remind themselves that there is quite another 
side to the question than that of mere restriction. 
It would not be fair, for example, in thinking of 
the law of gravitation, to fix the mind only on 
the things it forbids and exclude the things it 
allows. To see merely the structures it condemns 
and casts down, and have no eye for those it 
approves and upholds, would betray a mentality 
with no sense of proportion. ‘The constructive 
and consolidating work of gravitation, whereby 
it maintains in reciprocal and harmonious rela- 


78 THE THRESHOLD 


tion all the multitudinous members of the cosmic 
system, infinitely transcends anything in the way 
of mere destructive and disintegrating work in 
which it may be employed. When one thinks of 
the fact that every day this law not only preserves 
the unity and reciprocity of the solar system, but 
is sweeping it along—sun, moon and planets with 
all their attendant satellites—at a daily rate of 
a million miles in a straight line, so that instead 
of spinning round like a top in one place, the 
entire system is as many miles from where it was 
when the earth became habitable as there are min- 
utes in two hundred thousand million years—it 
comes as a great and wholesome corrective to the 
pin-point view. 

Now what the law of gravitation is to the physi- 
cal world, may be taken to illustrate what the 
moral law is to the world of accountable being. 
It holds the system together, it gives it coherence 
and balance, it inspires and directs its activities. 
To think, then, of this law merely as exercising 
brake-power, restricting and restraining the free 
use of faculty, is a quite one-sided view. It must 
be conceived of as the driving force of the moral 
world as well as its power of control. In brief, 
it is the one great ultimate force of Divine Love, 


THE LAW OF THE LORD 79 


seeking and finding multiplied modes of self- 
expression and self-impartation. 

The highest expression of Law as Love is 
reached in the Incarnate Son of God. Jesus be- 
comes the final and focal point where Love and 
Law both meet and mingle and find their unity. 
In Him the law found adequate articulation and 
came to its fullest expression. This is what He 
meant when He said “I am come not to destroy 
but to fulfil.” The word “fulfil” here means to 
“fill full,” to charge to the brim. Christ took 
the moral law up into His own personality, He 
embodied it, He gave it full, free, unhindered play 
throughout the whole world of His thought and 
feeling, His words and deeds. He became in 
Himself the law done into life. 


“And so the Word had breath and wrought 
With human hands, the creed of creeds, 
In loveliness of perfect deeds 
More strong than all poetic thought.” 


Paul tells us that the end of the law is love 
out of a pure heart. But that which emerges in 
the end as an actual thing, must have been in- 
volved in the beginning as a possible thing. So 
that Paul might just as truly have said “The 


So THE THRESHOLD 


? 


beginning of the law is love.” It took its rise in 
the loving heart of God and when it flows down 
and is shed abroad in the loving, loyal and respon- 
sive heart of man to upleap to the level of its 
source, its circuit is complete. 

Thus, then, wherever we pierce through to the 
true inwardness of law, we find that the essence 
of it is love. To discover this vital principle, to 
respond to it with all the heart and soul and 
mind and strength, is to be bathed in blessedness 
and to know what it means to “delight in the law 
of the Lord.” To put law and love, then, in 
opposing camps, is totally to misconstrue them 
both. All God’s laws were conceived in love, 
enacted in love and are administered by love. 
Love was their initial impulse and love is their 
final goal. Little wonder, then, that law thus 
interpreted should beget delight or that Paul 
should break out into rapture as he writes: 


“There is, therefore now, no condemnation to them 
which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, 
but after the spirit. For the law of the spirit of life in 
Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and 


death.” 


V 


In His Law Doth He Meditate 
Day and Night 


In our last study we saw that the human will 
that puts itself in line with the law of the Lord 
finds itself caught in a stream of pure and purify- 
ing force which is steadily and continuously 
setting toward the ideal righteousness. 

It is a force always at hand and available for 
driving-power, direction, and control. Just as 
magnetism will possess a needle that is sur- 
rendered to its sway, so that every molecule be- 
comes polarised, so this great force of moral mag- 
netism will polarise the human will that swings 
free to its mystic potency. It will invest the sur- 
rendered will with attractions toward the highest 
and with repulsions from the lowest, till the spirit 
of loyalty becomes organised in the very struc- 
ture of body and brain. When life is thus har- 
monised with the spirit of the universe, it is little 
wonder that it should thrill with delight. But 


that the godly man does not dwell merely in the 
81 


82 THE THRESHOLD 


realm of delightful emotions, is clear from the 
verse under study to-day. The joy of the blessed 
life becomes greatly enhanced, when in addition 
to the feelings being stirred, thought is broadened, 
deepened and enriched. ‘The feelings of course 
have a very valuable and important part to play 
in the religious lffe. But they must be taken up 
into thought, and disciplined into service, or they 
will break bounds and bring the life to grief. 
They represent immense driving power, but power, 
to vindicate its possession must be yoked up to 
some serviceable piece of work. Moreover the 
power to go, must always be accompanied by the 
power to slow. Every driver of an engine—every 
owner of an automobile—knows what a sense of 
satisfaction and security springs from the feel that 
his machine is instantly responding to the various 
levers, leaping forward or slowing, turning, re- 
versing, or coming to a stand, at a touch. With- 
out this consciousness of control, a motor trip 
would become one of the most nerve-racking ex- 
periences through which one could pass. With it, 
a day on the road is a delight. Nor is the delight 
in any way modified but immeasurably heightened, 
when the driver not only knows his machine to be 
responsive to his touch, but knows why it responds, 


IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE 83 


and is able mentally to visualise what takes place 
every time a lever is pulled or a button pressed. 
Thus it all comes back to this, that the keenest 
joy of life, viewed as a going concern, springs from 
the consciousness of self-control—that is to say 
from one’s loyal acceptance of duty and allegiance 
to law. 

While then the delight of the blessed life fills 
the heart of the godly man, he likewise finds end- 
less occupation for his brain in the contemplation 
of the moral law, which while commanding his 
reverential awe, is also forever challenging the 
highest effort of his thought. As he pushes be- 
hind and beneath the mere statutory direction, he 
comes face to face with that all-pervading Per- 
sonality of whose will all laws are simply the 
expression and effect. 

The secrets of the spiritual realm like those 
of the material universe reveal themselves only 
to those whose minds are keyed to truth. “Every 
one that is of the truth,” said Christ, ‘“‘heareth my 
voice.” Nature may be regarded as saying the 
same. ‘To come into her presence with a preju- 
diced mind, to try and force her facts into our 
own preconceived theories is effectually to shut 
her mouth. Like Christ before Pilate, she is dumb 


84 THE THRESHOLD 


before prejudice. The physical world is organ- 
ised thought, else there could be no science of it. 
If there were no ordered intelligence behind the 
phenomena of nature how then could they be 
translated into terms of order? Kelvin’s fine 
phrase that “Science is simply thinking God’s 
thoughts after him” is only another way of say- 
ing this. We refuse to believe that there is any- 
thing haphazard or capricious in the happenings 
of nature, and though there may be many events 
the occurrence of which we have not yet been able 
to reduce to any ordered system, we cannot doubt 
that a fuller knowledge of the facts harvested 
from a wider field of observation, will put the 
key into our hands. 

But that the mind of man can thus to any de- 
gree spell out the mind of God as it stands 
expressed in the laws and forces of the material 
order, implies a relation between the creative mind 
of God, and the interpreting mind of man. The 
very possibility of science rests upon this implica- 
tion. That this mutual relation should be part 
of the divine purpose would seem to be a neces- 
‘sary requirement in any system of thought which 
seeks to interpret the universe and man’s place 
in it, in terms of ethics. If God desires to be 


IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE 85 


known and trusted, to be loved and obeyed by 
his creatures, then clearly he must make that desire 
both intelligible and commendable to them, and 
how can his mind in this or in any other direc- 
tion be made ascertainable or intelligible except- 
ing to minds fashioned to some degree after his 
own. Between Governor and governed, Leader 
and led, Teacher and taught, Father and child, 
there must be some point of contact, some com- 
mon ground, where they can meet and come to an 
understanding. Where no such contact can be 
set up, there can be no authority on the one hand 
nor obligation on the other. 

Research in the field of nature has such a fas- 
cination for the scientific mind, and men become 
so absorbed in the use of microscope and telescope 
as to become insensible to hunger and thirst. In 
the pursuit of knowledge in chemical and elec- 
trical investigations they expose themselves to 
numberless risks. Men brave the rigours of the 
polar regions and dwell in fever-stricken jungles, 
amid the stifling heats of the tropics, that they 
may add to the sum of human knowledge, extend 
the area of human delight, or lengthen the span 
of human life. The pathway of scientific investi- 
gation and discovery is strewn with the bones of 


86 THE THRESHOLD 


countless pioneers and the martyrs of science are 
well-nigh as numerous as those of religion. 

But if researches into physical nature are of 
such absorbing interest that men are prepared to 
perish in their quest and— 


Follow knowledge like a sinking star 
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought: 


then what about the study of the moral universe? 
What about the fascination of inquiry into the 
method of God in working out His sovereign pur 
poses in history, and carrying all things forward 
to the goals of His beneficent desire? Surely here 
is a field that challenges the highest gifts of heart 
and brain, a field in which the mind may range to 
all eternity. Here are laws and forces as high as 
the throne of God and deep as the heart of man. 
But the science of spiritual things is not only fas- 
cinating, it is intensely practical, and its acquisi- 
tion heightens immeasurably all the values of life. 
It is this knowledge which according to the 
Psalmist is the distinguishing quest of the godly 
man. Here the human mind discovers its true 
correlate in the mind and heart of God. But 
God’s mind and heart are revealed to us, as 
nowhere else in the pages of His Word. Hence 


IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE 87 


it is that meditation in the ‘law of the Lord” as 
there disclosed, becomes the godly man’s delight. 

Now the word “meditate” in the original, 
means to murmur a melody, or to say something 
over and over again as a loving refrain, upon 
which mind and heart delight to linger. Thus the 
suggestion sought to be conveyed seems to be, that 
by brooding and crooning over the law of God, 
and sympathetically thinking and feeling one’s 
way into the innermost spirit of it, we become con- 
scious of and responsive to its underlying music. 
Deep calleth unto deep, and in this antiphonal 
the soul becomes attuned according to the laws of 
a preordained affinity. We have already seen that 
the law without must have its counterpart within, 
to which it can make its appeal. It is through 
meditation that the soul’s awareness is awakened 
to catch the “law within the law” to which it is 
related, as truly as are the organs of physical sight 
and hearing to the vibrations of light and sound. 
Harmony of color and design to the optic nerve, 
or of sound to the auditory nerve, is of such a 
nature, that it sets these nerves singing, so to speak, 
responsive to its music, till the whole being be- 
comes tremulous with the gracious spirit of which 
the laws of light and sound are merely the expres= 


88 THE THRESHOLD 


sion. If meditation in the physical laws that 
mould the dewdrop, that distil the fragrance of 
the flower, that marshal the starry hosts, that 
paint the glories of the sunset, and gently open 
the gateways of the dawn, that weep in the fall- 
ing rain, that smile in the rainbow and laugh in 
the waves that break in multitudinous music on a 
thousand shores—have such a power to stir the 
heart with rapture, or hush the spirit into trem- 
bling awe, then what untold delights, what un- 
dreamt of possibilities of wondering ecstasy, must 
await the experience of the soul that sinks into the 
depths of the moral law and comes “‘breast to 
breast with God.” ‘The cure for all our narrow- 
mindedness, our shallow-heartedness, our bitter- 
ness and bigotry, our lopsideness and contemptible 
littleness, lies just here—so close indeed that we 
do not see it. Listen to the great Apostle—‘‘Say 
not in thine heart who shall ascend into heaven 
to bring Christ down or descend into the deep to 
bring Him up again from the dead. The Word 
is nigh thee even in thy mouth and in thy heart.” 


Speak to Him thou, for He hears thee 
And spirit with spirit may meet; 
Closer is He than breathing, 

And nearer than hands and feet. 


IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE 89 


We have been too content to live on the mere 
surface of things. As swallows skim the bosom of 
a lake and dip their wings and fly away, all care- 
less and unconscious of the depths beneath, so we 
flit to and fro across the surface of time all heed- 
less of the great and solemn eternity that every- 
where and always underspreads the most trivial 
round and common task. Our modern life is lived 
under such stress and strain of body and brain, 
that it is exceedingly difficult even when desired to 
win opportunity for quiet thoughts of God and 
things unseen. Our Western life is a life of hurry 
and worry of haste and waste. It isa rush anda 
race from morning till night. The East does not 
hurry. There is an Oriental proverb which says, 
“There is only one person that requires to be in a , 
hurry and that is the Devil, for he has a great 
deal to do and only a limited time in which to do 
it.” Unless we can be redeemed from the pace 
at which we move, or rather from the anxiety that 
begets the pace, we shall not live out half our 
days. We must, even in the interests of our 
business efficiency, to say nothing of our soul’s 
health, find time for the quiet and reflective hour. 
We live in such a simmer of excitement that some 
of us cannot bear the brooding stillness of retreat. 


go THE THRESHOLD 


Silence gets on our nerves. We have a morbid 
craving for stimulation. We hate to be alone 
and must have some one by with whom to talk. 
If that be impracticable, then some engrossing 
book, or thought-preventing picture-show. This 
is all in very sad contrast with the lives that were 
lived by our fathers and their sires. At all costs, 
they sought to keep at least some time inviolate, 
some vacant spaces in which the shining ones 
might come and go between them and the great 
unseen. Religion was their life. They saw that 
it must be everything or nothing and so, every-_ 
thing, they resolved it should be. All interests 
and affairs, family, social, business and State, 
were planned and executed with reference to it. 
No serious step was taken without prayer and 
earnest thought as to how it would bear on one’s 
relations to God and affect one’s influence for 
Good. The Divine will was consulted and even 
its intervention sought, rather than that a false 
step should be taken or a wrong decision made. 
This brought religion into everyday life and made 
it very real and prominent. It became the atmos- 
phere in which they lived and moved, and unless 
it be allowed thus to control our common affairs, 
it is difficult to see of what practical value it can 


IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE gl 


be, or why we should hold it in regard. There 
may of course be risk lest a too easy familiarity 
with sacred things should result in lowering 
religion to the level of the market-place, instead 
of lifting the market-place to the level of it. But 
it does not compare with the risk of excluding God 
utterly from the domain of business and politics, 
as though His presence were an intrusion, and 
these were areas which religion must not be per- 
mitted to invade. 

The effect of the latter policy is alas! only too 
painfully apparent in the lowering of our morals 
and the laxity of our laws. This treatment of 
religion as though it were an exotic—some deli- 
cate transplantation from a foreign clime, which 
can only be kept alive under hothouse conditions 
—is one of the Devil’s most successful methods 
of countering the Kingdom of God. If our 
religion be of such a type that it cannot survive 
contact with the world then so far as this life is 
concerned it is a clear futility, and the sooner it 
is displaced and superseded by one that can, the 
sooner will we clear ourselves of the world’s con- 
tempt. To talk of it as though it were too sacred 
a thing to be handled suggests at once the inevi- 
table enquiry:—then why keep going a concern 


Q2 THE THRESHOLD 


which has not only no working value, but con- 
sumes time and money and energy to sustain? 
Christ spoke of its forces under the symbols of 
Salt and Light. But imagine purchasing salt 
under strict injunction that on no account must 
it be brought into contact with any other article, 
but be sealed and kept apart. Why, the very dis- 
tinctive quality it possesses, suggests, prophesies, 
calls out for contact, and fulfils itself only as it 
finds it. Or again, imagine if you can the Electric 
Supply Company placing an embargo on all its 
customers to the extent that while light-energy 
will be delivered yet it will only be on the strict 
condition that it is not to be used at night! You 
say that is too ridiculous. Excuse me, it is not a 
bit more ridiculous than our imagining that the 
savour and illumination of religion have been be- 
stowed to be preserved and conserved, lest by 
contact with the world of moral corruption and 
darkness they should be lost. The fact is that 
' the only way to save your religion is to spend it. 
He that seeks to save it by keeping it, will lose it 
and be counted guilty of default. 

But there is another reason why we have 
elbowed religion out of common life and restricted 
it to Sabbath use, and that is, that our common 


IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE 93 


life would simply be impossible in many of its 
practices, if our religion were permitted to dictate 
and control. Hence to avoid unpleasantness we 
keep them apart. Such a sense of the Divine 
presence as we are contending for, might prove 
exceedingly embarrassing in many of our trans- 
actions and render others impossible of attempt. 

But do not let us fall under the error of sup- 
posing that because God is invisible to us we are 
unseen by Him. Whether we will or not, we are 
dwellers in His domain, and there is positively 
no square inch of the universe from which He is 
withdrawn. The Western races are worn and 
wasted. They find themselves spent and ex- 
hausted by the pace at which they are compelled 
to move, and instead of seeking the cure in those 
healing silences, where face to face with the 
Eternal they can gather force and freshness for 
the daily fight, they either plunge into some wild 
whirl of excitement that makes them forget for a 
time the drudgery of their colorless existence, or 
else they dope themselves with one or other of the 
always available drugs, and effect a temporary 
escape from depression, at the cost of its subse- 
quent and sevenfold return. The fact is that this 
life was never planned to be run apart from God, 


94. THE THRESHOLD 


and it cannot be done without friction and fret. 
The whole of our trouble is due either to adopting 
substitutes for God, or leaving Him wholly out 
of count. ‘The cure for most, if not all of our 
maladies, physical, mental and moral, lies in the 
prescription of our text. 

The God consciousness of the old Hebrew 
Psalmists was as keen if not keener than their 
sense of the things they felt and saw. They 
pierced the veils of the visible, and endured as 
seeing Him Who is invisible. In what a world 
of hallowed thought and feeling must the man 
have dwelt who wrote the 139th Psalm :— 


O Lord, Thou hast searched me, and known me. 

Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising. 
Thou understandest my thought afar off. 

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art 
acquainted with all my ways. 

For there is not a word in my tongue, but lo, O Lord, 
thou knowest it altogether. } 

Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid Thine 
hand upon me. 

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I 
cannot attain unto it. 

Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit? or whither shall 


I flee from Thy presence ? 
If I ascend up into Heaven, thou art there; if I make 
my bed in the underworld, behold, Thou art there. 


IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE 95 


If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the 
uttermost parts of the sea; 

Even there shall Thy hand lead me, and uy right 
hand shall hold me. 

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the 
night shall be light about me. 

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night 
shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both 
alike to Thee. 


And let it be noted this is no mournful plaint 
of a hunted soul, seeking escape from the All- 
seeing eyes. On the contrary, this sense of Je- 
hovah’s presence folding him round, going before, 
following after and laying upon him gentle but 
Almighty hands, is the triumphant note of the 
song. The Psalmist is exulting in the everywhere- 
ness of God—that, go where he will, he is still 
within the encircling arms. That wherever he may 
walk his ways, or wing his flight, there step for 
step will walk with him, or beat for beat, will 
wing with him the Unseen Presence, upholding 
his goings and guarding his way, through storm 
and shine, through peace and war, by land and 
sea, by dark and day. Now such a sense of the 
Divine nearness in which the Psalmist rejoiced we 
may be tempted to think of as possible under old- 
world conditions and in the slow-going and 


96 THE THRESHOLD 


monotonous Orient, but out of the question for 
the rapidly-moving and ever-changing West in 
which we dwell. But let us not forget that all 
the same, whether we be conscious of it or not, 
He besets us behind and before, and lays upon 
us His gentle but Almighty hand. He is always 
at call. Always at hand to reinforce our drooping 
purposes and strengthen us in all that is pure 
and wise and good. Let us cultivate the sense of 
His presence, till such a God-consciousness pos- 
sesses the soul as shall lift us up above all the 
petty annoyances, irritations and bewilderments 
of time and bathe our spirits in the healing silence 
of God’s cool and calm eternity. 


Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, 
Cry,—clinging Heaven by the hems; 

And lo, Christ! walking on the water— 
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames! 


VI 
A Tree Planted by Rivers of Water 


Now we have seen how delight in the law re- 
quires to be succeeded by meditation in the law 
if the realm of the emotions is to be brought into 
subjection to the realm of thought. This it must 
be if the helm of life is to be held in the grip 
of a resolute purpose, and not swing this way 
and that to every wind and wave of feeling. 
The feelings must be taken up into the mind and 
disciplined by the reason into order and control. 
They represent great executive force, but force 
that is unregulated is not only useless, it may 
work untold harm. It must therefore be placed 
under the rule of reason, instructed by con- 
science, and thus controlled by mental and moral 
considerations. But this control must always be 
exercised so as not to impair initiative, discourage 
spontaneity, or destroy the power of self-expres- 
sion, because life has been bestowed in order to 


be expressed and displayed. 
97 


98 THE THRESHOLD 


This then seems to be the order of the Psalm- 
ist’s thought. Delight in the law passes through 
meditation, into a well-reasoned apprehension 
and appreciation of the law, to emerge and ex- 
press itself through this mental process in terms 
of character and conduct, for it is character and 
conduct that we are to understand as being sym- 
bolised by the tree and its fruit. 

We have seen that the blessed man reaches 
his bliss through piercing through the dry surface 
of the written code and letter of the law to the 
tree, fresh and ever-flowing spirit, which is its 
vital and vitalising principle. We used the ex-~~ 
pression stream of force when speaking of the 
law and found that immediately a man placed 
himself in line with the divine requirement in 
full and glad surrender, he found that he was 
tapping a veritable underground river of spiritual 
energy, which straightway leapt to his service, 
to flow through all his being and carry its life- 
giving dynamic to every faculty of body and 
brain. Now no finer illustration could possibly 
have been employed by the Psalmist in order to 
set forth this result than that of a tree planted 
by a river-side. It strikes its roots down into a 
soil saturated with life-giving potency, and is 


A TREE PLANTED BY RIVERS OF WATER 99 


thus able to lift itself up in fresh and vigorous 
defiance of the Sirocco’s fiery breath and the sun- 
beams’ flaming swords. 
_ The idea sought to be conveyed then, is that 
the blessed life is not merely a set of emotions 
which expend themselves in thrills of inward 
delight—nor even a set of mental conclusions 
which the reason has fashioned into a system of 
thought, but it is all this fine thought and gracious 
feeling, breaking into fair and fragrant bloom. 
Because the roots of the blessed life are struck 
deep into the soil of the invisible it comes to / 
leaf and blossom and fruit in the visible. What 
water is to the life of a tree the spirit of the law 
is to the life of the soul. As a man drinks in 
that spirit, it fills and floods and fertilises his 
whole being. He thenceforth embodies the law 
in himself. It is no more merely outward, but 
inward; incorporated in living flesh and blood. 
He furnishes it with a fitting field in which to dis- 
play its innermost meaning and manifold powers. 
He supplies it with a body and brain that it may 
incarnate itself—and so the Law has breath, and 
becomes a living soul. 
_ A perfectly healthy tree-life is the visible prod- 
cte of invisible physical forces which translate 


100 THE THRESHOLD 


themselves into terms of natural beauty and) 
utility, in fragrance and fruit. In like manner a’ 
perfectly healthy and harmonious human life is. 
the visible product of invisible spiritual forces, 


; 


which by mystic processes translate themselves | 


into terms of moral beauty and efficiency. 


We have already seen in previous studies that, 
the active principle of the law is Jove. But love \ 


must find expression. It must expend itself on 
the object of its regard. It finds its highest and 
most rapturous expression in sacrifice. Show it 
the line of greatest resistance in self-sacrificing 
service, and that is the line it will above all 
others select, and along which it will pour its 
richest treasure. 

Now what flower and fruit are to a tree, that 
sacrifice is to human life. In the Saviour’s para- 
ble of the vine the bloom and fruitage represents 
the supreme effort of life, even at the cost of 
sacrifice, to pass on the torch of being. The 
fruit of a tree is its recognition of the prin- 
ciple that it may not live to itself. It must not 
become a vital terminus but a mere wayside sta- 
tion, in which life temporarily abides that it may 
set up a centre of distribution and then move on. 
This was the law under which all life was placed 


A 

- 
: 
in 


\ 


A TREE PLANTED BY RIVERS OF WATER 101 


in the beginning of days—‘“‘Be fruitful and multi- 
ply and replenish the earth.” It is in the fruit of 
a tree that the principle of reproduction lies 
cradled and concealed. The whole future organ- 
ism is there potentially gathered up in miniature. 
It is the beautiful and fragrant expression of life’s 
loyalty to the law of succession under the pressure 
of which the vital principle demands of the 
organism in which it for the time resides, a right- 
of-way along which it may pour its reproductive 
powers. 

Thus then as at the spring-time we pierce be- 
neath all this seeming gaiety and wantonness, this 
riot and revel of feast and fragrance, of colour 
and contour, in leaf, and flower and fruit, we 
see how deeply serious is the business for which 
it stands. It is life’s supreme effort to fulfil its 
stewardship. It is an acknowledgment that the 
vital principle is not a mere possession to be 
selfishly enjoyed or fooled and frittered away at 
will—but a deposit to be held in trust for poster- 
ity and bequeathed unencumbered and unspoiled. 
Now it is with these deep-lying thoughts, these 
mystical and sacramental meanings that we are 
concerned, (Here are the two great obligations 

‘which the symbol of the fruitful tree exemplifies 


; 


102 THE THRESHOLD 


and proclaims: First, to hand down unimpaired to 
our successors that which we have so richly re- 
ceived. Secondly, to suffer and make sacrifice if 
‘need be in the fulfilment of our trust. All that we 
are enjoying to-day has come to us through the 
struggle of others. It is the fruit of sacrifice, the 
purchase of blood. We can vindicate our right to 
enjoy such sacrificial fruit only as we are prepared 
in turn to be sacrificial too. We may not be called 
upon to die for our country, but we are called to 
live for it. This will often call for a greater 
heroism than that which is required to lead a 
forlorn hope—to scale forbidding heights and to 
earn the badge of bravery. It is the homely 
heroism of common life. There are strange forces 
at work in the social life of our time, forces highly 
organised and gathering in intelligence and power. 
But unless these newly awakened potencies, in 
the persons of those who wield them, are brought 
to the Cross of Calvary, and are there baptised 
into the spirit of Christ’s self-sacrificing love, they 
will work disaster and doom. Deeds are seeds 
and we have but to ask what as a people we are 
doing and the problem of our destiny is instantly 
solved. 


FR Ie 


What does the Psalmist desire to convey by the 


A TREE PLANTED BY RIVERS OF WATER 103 


assurance “His leaf also shall not wither’? I 
have worked this out from a biological point of 
view in my chapter on “Metabolism” in the Fern- 
ley Lecture for 1923,* in some such way as 
follows: 

When the Psalmist likened the godly man to a 
tree, whose leaf should not wither, he was prob- 
ably building better than he knew. But be this 
as it may, in fixing attention on the greenness of 
the leaf, he seized on the one and only gateway 
through which life in all its myriad forms can be 
sustained. One wonders as to how much he did 
know of the functions fulfilled by the leaf. Hav- 
ing shown that the roots of the tree are struck 
deep into the well-soaked river-bank, it really 
seems, at first sight unnecessary to affirm any- 
thing in regard to the perennial greenness of the 
leaf. That surely might have been taken for 
granted under such favourable conditions as are 
named. Moreover, after stating that the tree 
brings forth its fruit in its season, does it not seem 
superfluous and rather in the nature of an anti- 
climax to refer to the leaf at all? So indeed, ona 
surface view, it might appear, but aided by inves- 
tigators in this field we come to a better knowl- 


* “The Church which is His Body’, Studied in the Light of 
Biological Research,” p. 45. 


104 THE THRESHOLD 


edge as to the functions fulfilled by the leaf in 
the life-history of the tree. Biological research 
has revealed that upon the leaf as on a pivot the 
whole fortune of the tree structure has been made 
to turn. Whether the Psalmist made this refer- 
ence wittingly or otherwise, the fact remains that 
when he did so he was giving the leaf the due 
place, to which, according to the most advanced 
scientific knowledge, it should be assigned. As a 
matter of plain fact, there is only the thickness 
of a green leaf between the whole world of 
physical life and the silent realm of death. ‘This 
is not poetry, but simple, downright prose. 
Scientific investigation reveals that the greenness 
of a leaf is due to the presence of what is known 
as chlorophyll—a substance that appears to be 
the product of a union between sunlight and the 
protoplasmic fluid which the leaf contains. Under 
the action of the sun’s rays little granules of this 
chlorophyll bunch themselves together into 
masses called chloroplasts, each of which, on 
examination, is seen to be a manufacturing centre 
of the nutriment upon which the life of the tree 
or plant depends. This is the tiny hinge on which 
the door of life for man and beast has been made 
to swing. According to Professor Huxley, the 


A TREE PLANTED BY RIVERS OF WATER 105 


vegetable Kingdom is the only one that really 
works. As for the Animal Kingdom, all its mem- 
bers from man downwards to the ameeba, are only 
consumers of manufactured products, non-pro- 
ducers, mere hangers-on! The green leaf is the 
whirling seat and centre of ceaseless activity. 

In considering the life of a tree we have been 
accustomed to stress the importance of the root. 
This, however, in the light of what we have 
seen, is a case of misplaced emphasis, and it is the 
leaf upon which the accent must fall. It is true 
that the root is responsible for supplying the 
water-power without which the machinery of 
assimilation, development, and reproduction could 
not be run. Upon the root also devolves the duty 
of extracting and passing on certain salts from the 
soil which go to the structure of the tree. These 
are, however, so amazingly small in proportion to 
the tree’s bulk as practically to be a negligible 
quantity. 

Timiriazeff, Professor of Botany in the Univer- 
sity of Moscow, conducted a most interesting ex- 
periment in reference to this fact. He planted 
a willow wand weighing five pounds in a pot 
containing exactly two hundred pounds weight 
of soil. He watched and watered this wand for 


106 THE THRESHOLD 


five years, after which he carefully lifted it out, 
removing every grain of adhering soil, to discover 
that it now weighed one hundred and sixty-nine 
pounds three ounces. But so little had it drawn 
from the soil itself, that when the latter was 
weighed it was found to be but two ounces less 
than the original two hundred pounds. Instead, 
then, of the root, it is the leaf that represents the 
point where the real business of the tree is carried 
on, and the most vital relations are set up and 
sustained. When a seed is cast off by the parent — 
tree it is started out clad in a suitable case, under 
cover of which are packed up all its requirements, 
including a measure of manufactured and con- 
centrated nutriment for setting up housekeeping 
on its own account. Should it find suitable soil it 
straightway responds and lets loose its latent 
energies. Once the wondrous machinery of life is 
thus set going it is run for a time on inherited 
fuel—the portion of goods falling to it, so to 
speak, upon leaving home, and which is enough 
to start it in life for itself with a fair chance of 
success. By the time the root has struck down 
and the shoot thrust up, the plant’s capital, in the 
way of inherited stores, is used up, so that it now 
requires to take its hands out of its pockets and 


— 
~ 


A TREE PLANTED BY RIVERS OF WATER 107 


work for its daily bread. ‘These hands are its 
leaves, and the independent life of the plant 
begins from the moment that the first ray of light 
falls upon its unfolding leaf. Until the ray of 
sunlight thus falls upon the leaf’s surface its 
activity cannot begin. This activity is directed 
to extracting and assimilating the carbon that is 
stored up in the atmosphere. In the atmosphere 
it is in combination with oxygen, but the chloro- 
phyll in the leaf breaks down this combination, 
absorbs the carbon and releases the oxygen. Upon 
the leaf is thrown the entire responsibility of keep- 
ing up the food supply for the tree’s support. It 
becomes the centre of exchange, the transforming 
Station where inorganic matter is changed into 
organic and thus the life of the tree maintained. 


‘The green leaf, according to biology, is the one 


and only medium whereby solar energy becomes 
translated into vital force, and is made available 
for use by man and beast, for without the green 


‘leaf there is absolutely nothing that could live. 


It is a significant fact that in the Genesis story 
of Creation the emphasis is placed on the green 
herb as the pivot on which life in man and beast 
was made toturn. Genesis |: 29, ‘““And God said, 
Behold, I have given you every herb [| Hebrew 


108 THE THRESHOLD 


“eseb’—the same word translated “‘green herb” in 
Genesis 1:30 and 9:3] bearing seed, which is 
upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in 
the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to 
you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of 
the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to 
every thing that°creepeth upon the earth, wherein 
there is life, I have given every green herb [ Heb. 
“eseb’ | for meat: and it was so.” Again in the 
story of the Flood the dove that Noah sent forth 
from the Ark is represented as coming home from 
its second flight with a freshly plucked olive leaf 
in her mouth, the pledge and prophecy of the 
multitudinous life of man and beast with which 
God was about to renew the face of the earth. 
Thus the earliest word of Scripture and the latest 
word of biological science agree in stressing the 
green leaf as the one absolutely essential thing 
upon which the maintenance of life depends. 
Now that which in the spiritual life, whether 
individual or communal, corresponds to the func- 
tion of the leaf in the way of appropriating and 
assimilating the forces of another and higher 
world, is, according to the whole teaching of both 
scripture and experience, the function of faith. 


A TREE PLANTED BY RIVERS OF WATER 109 


. Unless by a living faith we are in account current 
with the spiritual forces that are banked to our 
credit, we must blanch into anemia and fail into 
spiritual decline. Or to retain the metaphor of 
the Psalmist, instead of being like a tree planted 
by the rivers of water, we shall be merely a drift 
of dried and driven leaves. Nor is it merely that 
the spiritual life in such a case becomes dwarfed 
and diminished. There results an all-round de- 
preciation of values. Every department of life, 
physical, intellectual, and moral, depends for its 
reinforcement on the soul. We do not dream 
how deeply central is the religious factor, nor how 
powerful it is in determining our social, political, 
and industrial values. We can do our best work 
in this world only as we draw on that world for 
our supplies. What the sun is to the leaf, that 
and infinitely more is God to the soul. Only in 
correspondence with Him who is the Life of life, 
the Light of light and the Fountain of all the 
forces that sweep in and around us, can we dis- 
cover either our greatest bliss or our highest effi- 
ciency. To shut ourselves up in this material 
world, with no outlook or outreach toward 
another, is to stultify our being and defraud it of 


110 THE THRESHOLD 


its flower and crown. Never was the need so great 
as at the present to hold fast to moral values. 

In these days of revision and reconstruction 
when the most cherished convictions are being 
called upon to verify themselves, we are being 
driven back from the outworks of mere form and 
ceremony to the naked and elemental truths for 
which our symbols and watchwords stand. Woe 
be to us if when we do fall back we have no solid 
ground on which to place our feet. It is a time 
of searching inwardness as to whether we are 
holding on to our faith as a merely cherished 
but perished form through which the spirit 
breathes no more, or as a great vital and vitalising 
reality. If the latter, then we need fear no legiti- 
mate test. Only the things that are temporary 
and incidental can be shaken, that the things that 
cannot be shaken may remain. The trouble with 
too many of us is that when the outward frame- 
work of things crumbles, there is nothing behind 
it. Instead of such outwardness revealing life it 
is concealing decay. The leaf as we have seen 
depends for its fresh and vivid green upon an- 
other world than this. Let it be cut off from that 
world then straightway it will blanch into a pale 
and sickly hue. Through want of light its bio- 


A TREE PLANTED BY RIVERS OF WATER II11 


chemistry will cease to function, with the result 
that not only will its own being be aborted, but 
that of the entire tree, whose fortunes, as we have 
seen, pivot on the behaviour of the leaf. Now 
through a thousand untoward happenings a leaf 
may seek and not find the wherewithal for its 
nutrition, and thus wither and fall. Thus when 
it is affirmed of the godly man that his leaf shall 
not wither, we may take it to mean that nothing 
shall ever be allowed to come in between him and 
the base of his supplies. His other-world con- 
nection will be continuously maintained. Though 
rooted in this world, yet like the tree he will 
stretch forth appealing and appropriating hands 
toward another upon which he will draw for his 
dynamic to be and to do and to endure. 


**T think that I shall never see 
A poem lovely as a tree; 


“A tree whose hungry mouth is prest 
Against the earth’s sweet flowering breast ; 


“A tree that looks at God all day 
And lifts her leafy arms to pray; 


“A tree that may in summer wear 
A nest of robins in her hair; 


112 THE THRESHOLD 


“Upon whose bosom snow has lain; 
Who intimately lives with rain. 


“Poems are made by fools like me, 
But only God can make a tree.” 


JOYCE KILMER. 


Vil 
W hatsoever He Doeth Shall Prosper 


This is a promise, which at first sight seems 
to be hopelessly at quarrel with the facts of life. 
There is not one of us who could not from his own 
observation, refute the proposition that Piety and 
Prosperity are interchangeable terms. All history 
gives it the lie. If the author of this Psalm had 
committed himself to such a view our first feel- 
ing would have been one of surprise at any writer, 
with any pretence to accuracy of observation, 
having the temerity to endorse a theory which 
the experience of the centuries so abundantly dis- 
proves, and in refutation of which he himself 
could have cited hundreds of cases in which he had 
seen the righteous overborne by disaster and the 
wicked established in “‘great power and flourish- 
ing like a green bay tree.” But as we look more 
closely at our text we see that it makes no such 
claim, as a mere casual reading would suggest. 
It is not the prosperity of the righteous man him- 
self that is here predicted, but rather the perma- 

113 


114 THE THRESHOLD 


nence and reproductiveness of his work. From a 
merely material point of view he may fail, indeed 
he often does. His whole career may be pursued 
under the most adverse conditions, at one time 
scorched with the fires of a quenchless hate, at an- 
other numbed by the icy breath of a freezing 
apathy. He may-be misunderstood, maligned and 
even martyred, but though men may kill hzm they 
cannot kill his work. The fruit that he is de- 
scribed as bringing forth in his season has seed in 
itself after its kind, and will go on reproducing 
itself, while he sleeps on. Nothing can do it 
hurt. No weapon formed against it can prosper. 
It mingles with the forces of the universe. It 
is secure from assault. No influence can weaken 
it; no power can arrest or destroy. Through 
storm and shine, through peace and war, by dark 
and day, it will hold on its victorious course. Not 
only is this so, but he knows it to be so. There 
is a deep and divine assurance begotten in his 
mind that whatever may happen to him is abso- 
lutely of no concern so long as what he has built 
survives. 

Of this survival he has never a doubt. This in- 
wrought confidence is the far out-weighing com- 
pensation which the good man possesses and en- 


WHATSOEVER HE DOETH SHALL PROSPER 115 


joys, amid all the slings and arrows of outrageous 
fortune. He need never doubt as to the ultimate 
triumph of the cause which he has espoused, and 
it is the cause, not himself, that matters. It is 
with its fortune, not his own, that he is concerned. 

This deep-seated conviction that righteousness 
is the winning force in history gives such a man 
the courage to attempt, the calmness to wait, and 
the patience to endure. All he asks is elbow- 
room in which to work and sow the good seed of 
the Kingdom. He may never see the harvest, but 
what of that! He has harvested the sheaves of 
other men’s sowing, whom he never saw, and so 
let other men reap the fields that he has scattered 
with the golden grain. 

Our text then is an encouragement to pursue 
the ideal in spite of the dispiriting actual by which 
we may be confronted and in the very face of the 
discouragements, which the want of any public 
backing may induce. It is this faculty of “‘stick- 
ing it,” and hopefully holding on in the teeth of 
thwarted purpose and baffled plan that always 
marks your top-quality man. ‘The pioneers in 
all the great paths of life have been men of this 
type, men who found their pay in their achieve- 
ment. 


116 THE THRESHOLD 


“Glory of virtue to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong. 
Nay, but she aimed not at glory, no lover of glory she! 
Give her the glory of going on and still to be. 

She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the 
just 

To rest in a golden grove or to bask in a summer sky. 

Give her the wages of going on and not to die.” 


This is the spirit that has cut the path of prog- 
ress for the world’s feet, though its own have 
been pierced by many a thorn and bruised by 
many a stone. Such souls have been content to 
know that though their eyes may never see the 
promised land, yet they have brought it nearer 
and made it easier of attainment for those who 
follow on. The pathway of human progress 
gleams with the bones of those who have perished 
in the process of blazing a track. 

Other men laboured and we have entered into 
their labours. They perished but their work sur- 
vives. Whether in science, art, medicine, law, 
invention, political freedom, social justice, reli- 
gion, the hands that fought for us and wrought for 
us and built the stairway up which we have 
climbed, have perished, but their work abides. 
By some strange irony it is only as they recede 
into the deep perspective of history that their 
names come to be duly honoured, and the value 


WHATSOEVER HE DOETH SHALL PROSPER LEY 


of their contribution duly appraised. James 
Walter, in giving what he calls ‘‘Shakespeare’s 
True Life,” shows how blind were his contem- 
poraries to his unparalleled services. Indeed, this 
has to be placed to the credit of Germany, that 
she was the first to ascribe to Shakespeare his 
proper place on the pinnacle of literary fame. 
Germany has this against us forever, that she had 
to discover for us, and to us, thegreatest English- 
man that has ever lived—so true is it that the 
prophet is without honour in his own country. 
Shakespeare has passed and perished, but his work 
lives on, gathering in splendour with the passing 
of the years. What matters it that his contem- 
poraries under-estimated him! ‘Time, the great 
master of the rolls, and custodian of the judg- 
ments of history, forever guards his name and his 
fame. 

What was true of Shakespeare in poetry was 
true of Sebastian Bach in music. Though one 
of the greatest of geniuses in musical composi- 
tion, he has had to wait some one hundred and 
fifty years to come to his kingdom and receive his 
crown. But because he believed in his work and 
wrought it regardless of fame, it will go on sing- 


118 THE THRESHOLD 


ing itself through the ages till it blends with the 
deep full music of the skies. 

And these are only types of thousands whose 
work received no recognition while they lived. 
Not only so, but in countless instances the nega- 
tive indifference passed out of its passive stage 
into one of positive hostility, and because they 
bravely held their ground, refusing to renounce 
their ideals, to sacrifice their principles and to 
sell the truth to serve the hour, they paid the 
penalty on the scaffold or at the stake, preferring 
to die rather than betray the cause which they 
had made their own. And they did it because 
in their heart of hearts they were assured that 
some day, and somehow, and somewhere, they 
would be vindicated before all worlds. It is this 
faculty of drawing on the future to reinforce the 
present that has marked all the higher spirits of 
the world. Their faith in their mission has been 
the faith of the seer, 

Who can so forecast the years 
To find in loss a gain to match: 


To reach a hand through time and catch 
The far-off interest of tears. 


This is the faith that has made the men who 
have shaped the destinies of the race. It created 


WHATSOEVER HE DOETH SHALL PROSPER 119 


the heroes of the old world who, through it, ‘‘sub- 
dued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained 
promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched 
the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, 
out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant 
in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.” 
It was this faith that made the new world, for 
it fired the heart of Christ Himself with the dar- 
ing of an unquenchable hope. Listen to the writer 
to the Hebrews again as, after conducting us 
through the gallery of the world’s mighty men 
who gave the name and the character to the age in 
which they lived, he leads us up to the greatest 
of them all—“‘the Holiest among the mighty and 
the mightiest among the Holy’—‘“Wherefore 
seeing we also are compassed about with so great a 
crowd of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, 
and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and 
let us run with patience the race that is set before 
us, looking unto Jesus the author and finisher 
of our faith; who for the joy that was set before 
him endured the cress, despising the shame, and 
is set down at the right hand of the throne of 
God.” 

This is the spirit. It was this that made Luther 
the hero of the Reformation, and enabled Calvin 


120 THE THRESHOLD 


to stand unawed before the anathemas of Rome. 
It was this that made Savonarola hurl his charge 
of impurity against the Priesthood of his day, and 
it was this that fired John Knox, John Wesley 
and William Booth. And this is still the faith 
that must sustain you and me and all men. We 
may be little and unknown; there may seem to be 
nothing very sublime in the round of our daily 
toil—we may not be recognised or praised; nay 
we may be persecuted, maligned, misunderstood, 
but never mind, let us stick it! 


Go to your work and be brave, 
Halting not in your ways. 
Baulking the end half won 
For an instant’s dole of praise. 


Stand to your work and be strong, 
Certain of sword and of pen. 
Who are neither children nor gods 
But men in a world of men! 


Vill 


But the Ungodly Are Not So But Are 
Like the Chaff Which the Wind 
Driveth Away 


When the Psalmist declares that “the ungodly 
are not so’ this mof so must be regarded as 
teaching back and controlling by contrast every 
statement he makes with regard to the godly man. 
The godly man is for example pronounced 
“blessed” with all that word connotes for fulfilled 
expectation and realised desire. 

But the ungodly are not blessed. They have 
never found the true secret of perfect peace and 
perfect poise. (They are not as the firmly 
erounded growth by the ever-running stream and 
whose far-flung and richly fruited branches sway 
to the wind and wake into music under its mystic 
touch. And here, let it be noted, that the same 
on-rushing breeze that drives the vacant chaff in 
helter-skelter flight, sweeps down with equal force 
upon the full-freighted tree. But while the latter 


matching might with might, wrestles with the 
I2I 


122 THE THRESHOLD 


power of the air and wins therefrom a tougher 
fibre, an augmented strength, the former is at 
the mercy of every wind that blows. No finer 
contrast can be conceived than that of the living 
tree on the one hand, rich in fruit and foliage, 
standing in its fixed yet free and flexible strength 
challenging drought and tempest to do their worst, 
and the dead, dry, wind-driven chaff on the other 
hand which needs must dance to the piping of 
any and every wanton wind that blows. 

Nothing can be conceived more hopelessly help- 
less than the condition thus described, and this 
is the Psalmist’s delineation of the godless man. 
He is tossed to and fro by every up-rush of pas- 
sion from within or by every in-rush.of circum- 
stance from without. He has no pow sto as the 
Greeks used to say, no foothold upon which he 
can depend for defence or attack. He loosens his 
neck from the service of God, which is the truest 
liberty, only to bend it to a serfdom which binds 
him hand and foot and then thrusts out his eyes, 
till all the freedom that he knows is the freedom 
of a blind Samson, making sport for the philistines 
of appetite, till faith and hope and love are liter- 
ally burnt out of life, and the very faculty for 
God becomes disabled. This is the irony of the 


BUT THE UNGODLY ARE NOT SO 123 


situation that though a man may repudiate God 
as the Lord of his life he does not release himself 
from the necessity of service. He still has some 
god who claims his worship and to whom he 
renders homage—wealth, power, pleasure, fame, 
or self-indulgence in one or other of its seductive 
forms, lays its spell upon him; and these are gods 
that exact their dues and take heavy toll, with 
a rigour that leaves no opening for clemency, no 
room for discussion, no avenue for escape. That 
the victim is unconscious of his slavery and of 
the destination toward which he speeds constitutes 
one of the most appalling features of his fate. 
He is temporarily thrown into a condition of 
moral anesthesia, under the deadening influence 
of which, he is deluded into the belief that this 
go-as-you-please and do-as-you-choose policy is 
the true philosophy of life. I say temporarily, for 
conscience sooner or later must awaken from its 
sleep and resume command. It will rise in 
offended majesty, smiting the soul with torment- 
ing memories, and taking its revenges for neglect 
and abuse. What an abject slavery such so-called 
freedom conceals—-what corrosive chains it hides 
only those who have passed under its bondage can 
fully declare. 


124 THE THRESHOLD 


But although the experience of the ages has 
been condensed into precept, proverb, and psalm, 
in order to illustrate and enforce this truth, the 
fatal delusion still persists and prevails that law 
and freedom stand opposed, and that for life to 
be placed under restriction is to have its liberty 
curtailed. This.misconception springs, in part 
at least, from the failure to recognise or remember 
that the moral law is not something introduced 
subsequent to man’s appearance and imposed upon 
him from without, but that on the contrary it was 
built into his very structure. It was the regula- 
tive, architectonic principle of his construction— 
a principle, in frank and free concurrence with 
which, his life can alone find its complete and 
full-orbed expression, its perfect totality, its 
unity, its harmonisation, its God-like symmetry 
and strength. 

Thus within the bounds of law alone, can man 
really find the line of least resistance. This may 
seem to be contradictory, but once the experiment 
is made the seeming paradox vanishes and the 
principle is found to work. He finds a path pre- 
pared for his feet. He is on the King’s Highway 
and discovers that his whole being was made to 
vibrate to the rhythm of His laws. As a matter 


BUT THE UNGODLY ARE NOT SO 125 


of fact these laws are never seen in their full 
working strength and uttermost grace until they 
stand organised in godly character which they 
have moulded into shape and touched into beauty. 
Till they have been voluntarily taken up by 
human intelligence, acquiesced in by human con- 
sent, and embodied in human conduct, they fall 
short of their divinely appointed destination, they 
do not discover their adequate field, they are 
defrauded of the material through which alone 
they can come to their most consummate flower 
and crown. All God’s laws run down and root 
themselves in love, and they fulfil themselves 
only as they run their course and complete the 
circle by coming to fruit in love again. For what 
is love but the fulfilling of law, and what is law, 
but the lines that love has laid down, for reaching 
its own beneficent ends? 

With this great law of love the ungodly man 
is out of step. He is not marching to its music, 
and he is so constituted that he cannot be at 
discord and be content. A man may have the 
whole world against him, yet if he be at peace 
with himself he can bid the world go swing— 
what cares he for it, its love or hate, esteem or 
scorn! He will be through with it presently, and 


126 THE THRESHOLD 


even if he weren’t it would soon be through with 
him. It is just as ready to drop a man as to take 
him up—and with equal casualness or caprice. 
Even without leaving it, a man may be quit of 
this world, and as dead to its praise or blame 
as those who are locked in churchyard sleep are 
dead to the tide-of business that ebbs and flows 
along our streets. But there is one thing that 
a man can never be quit of, that is himself; and 
woe to him if it be an accusing self. He has to 
eat and drink, walk and sit, work and rest, wake 
and sleep in its eternal company. From a thou- 
sand outside voices a man may find refuge in 
death, but from the accusing voice of conscience 
death can not only afford him no prospect of re- 
lease, but will give to that voice a clearer accent, 
a more insistent and intensive note. He will need 
no judgment day, no judgment book, no outward 
and visible Judgment Seat, no pomp and circum- 
stance of a great assize to know his place; neither 
will he need any material fire to torment him with 
its flame. “For each guilty word and deed holds 
in itself the seed of retribution and undying 
pain.” The ungodly man will be self-arraigned, 
self-condemned, self-sentenced, _ self-separated, 
self-scourged. There need be nothing worse than 


BUT THE UNGODLY ARE NOT SO 127 


this and, if you can receive it, this will be hell. 
From this hell Christ came to save us. For this 
He lived and laboured and suffered; for this on 
the Green Hill without the City Wall, He died; 
for this He rose; for this He lives and reigns— 
and for this His Blessed Spirit folds us round and 
lays upon us His gentle and constraining Hands. 

The antithesis to the sturdy growth, of a full- 
fruited tree as presented in the storm-driven chaff, 
is both striking and strong. Over against the quiet 
strength and durableness of the life that is being 
lived in and for God, is placed the feverish haste, 
the whirling insecurity, of the life that is lived 
for self. Let us not forget who the ungodly are, 
that are here represented. They are those from 
whose life God has been deliberately cut out. It 
is a settled policy of aloofness on their part by 
which they would exclude God from their reckon- 
ing and ignore Him as of no account. ‘This 
attempt to live a self-contained life, shut up 
within the limits of earth and time is not without 
its difficulties. In order to prove successful, man 
would have first of all to do violence to certain 
organic instincts which are inseparable from his 
make-up—to effect indeed his own moral disin- 
heritance, to divest himself of his innate divinity. 


128 THE THRESHOLD 


Man has never yet been left to the mercy of a 
merely external revelation. ‘This had been to 
expose him to too great a risk. ‘Thus the idea of 
a “somewhat” or a “someone” greater than him- 
self has been divinely woven into the very texture 
of his mental and moral being. ‘This is the por- 
tion of goods which falleth to him and with which 
he has set out on his world-pilgrimage. Indeed 
without this antecedent and subjective revelation 
having first of all been incorporated into his very 
structure, any subsequent and objective revelation 
would have as much chance of a reception and 
appreciation, as would the gracious visit of light 
to sightless eyes. It comes therefore to this that 
the ungodly man is of necessity an ill-balanced 
man. He is not giving scope to the whole of 
his nature. The higher side is not in gear. He 
is therefore defective in control. Nor is this all. 
This higher side of his nature is not content to be 
ignored. It has its claims and its own way of 
asserting them. And though these claims may be 
disputed and repudiated, yet, as we have said, 
this cannot be done without violence. But this 
very violence breaks up the unity of a man’s per- 
sonality. His household is divided against itself, 
with the senior member of it gyved and gagged. 


BUT THE UNGODLY ARE NOT SO 129 


It is to this senior member that the external reve- 
lation is addressed, and between these two there 
is in spite of all attempts to censor and even 
mutilate communications, a sort of private wire, 
so that Paul was able to say: “By manifestation 
of the truth, we commend ourselves to every 
man’s conscience in the sight of God.” 

But a house divided against itself, says Christ, 
cannot stand. ‘That is to say, it lacks the unity 
which is the necessary element of permanence, and 
in the day of storm will be shattered into frag- 
ments and scattered in dust; or, to use the words 
of the text,—will be like the chaff which the 
wind driveth away. 

Here then, over against the permanence of a 
God-centred life as symbolised in the sturdy 
tree, is placed the passing and perishing stay of 
the self-centred life, as emblemed in the driven 
and distracted chaff. The godly life is the way 
of permanence because it is the way of entrance 
into God’s structural purpose and plan, in 
pursuance of which, all who acknowledge Him 
as Master and Lord are wrought up into that 
spiritual Temple the stones of which are human 
lives. Godliness is the binding element in 
human life. It is the only thing that can give 


130 THE THRESHOLD 


unity and coherence to character. And the rea- 
son for this is that we were made for God, to be 
dwelt in by Him. He alone is capable of assum- 
ing full command of the powers He has bestowed. 
He is the only conductor who can evoke the 
maximum music from life’s orchestra. He alone 
can bring into play the full concert of all the 
powers. 

Religion is not only a binding of one’s self back 
to God in bonds of loving loyalty, but also a 
binding into a unity of all the powers which con- 
stitute one’s own personality. It is the living 
ligamentary system of the spiritual realm, which 
co-ordinates the whole nature, physical, intellec- 
tual, and moral, marshalling it as one thing, to 
one end, and with no single inch of power left 
out. Religion, when it has its own way and gets 
through with a man, leaves absolutely no re- 
mainders. It uses him all up, finding an office 
for every function, and a field for every force. 
The ungodly are not so. 

First of all they are not harmonised with God 
and there is the consequent sense of dislocation 
and disintegration which this involves. They 
are cut off by their own self-will and pride of 
heart from the source and fount of the highest 


BUT THE UNGODLY ARE NOT SO 131 


satisfaction, and yet with the maddening desire 
for it still clamant and refusing to be still, or to 
be put off with lying words. They are not wth 
God in His beneficent purpose and plans therefore 
they are against Him, for as we have seen, there 
is no neutrality possible, so that for us to be 
against Him is to have Him against us. It is not 
merely that we are up against a dead blank un- 
yielding wall, but against a living active will, 
that has for its executive officers Infinite Wisdom 
and Infinite Power, the ministers of His infinite 
Love. We are hedged in on all sides by laws, 
administered with unsleeping vigilance. Against 
them we have not a sporting chance. We might 
as well try to escape from the law of gravitation. 
We are beset behind and before and cannot move 
without their surveillance or consent. But, fore- 
sooth, because they forbear to strike the moment 
we transgress, we fool ourselves into a sense of 
false security. We mistake the postponement of 
penalty for an amnesty, and interpret the suspen- 
sion of our sentence for an indulgence. We 
fondly imagine that we have out-distanced our 
retribution, because the years have intervened be- 
tween it and the offence. But the Avenger is 
ever on our trail. Our liberty is carefully cur- 


132 THE THRESHOLD 


tailed, and He can cover the distance in an in- 
stant. He can cancel it at a pounce. 

Is it any wonder then that the vanity with 
which the ungodly strut and swagger, should pro- 
voke the derision of the Gods, or that He that 
sitteth in the heavens should laugh! He knows 
that every avenue of escape is blocked and that 
our undoing is sure. Neither is there any safety 
in numbers. Any confederation of man, however 
finely organised, which deliberately leaves God 
out of account is doomed to disintegration. It 
builds into its system the spirit of negation, a 
spirit that must react against its structure and 
induce its decay. Here lies the peril of our 
modern democracy, lest it should build itself up 
in defiance of God and the moral law; mistaking 
material might for stability, and regarding mere 
magnitude as conferring the right to survive; 
whereas all history proves that numbers not only 
cannot help in such a case, but sadly hinder. The 
momentum of a nation’s descent is measured by 
its mass. Once we get a move on in the down- 
ward way, every step we take will accelerate 
the velocity of our descent, and diminish our 
chances of arrest and recovery. The structural 
principle of a society is the governing factor of 


BUT THE UNGODLY ARE NOT SO 133 


its fate. All you have to ask with regard to any 
state or nation, any guild or fraternity, any em- 
ployers’ federation or trade union, or any cor- 
porate body of any kind, is this simple question— 
What is the vital principle of its incorporation— 
why was it called into being? what holds it to- 
gether? by what spirit is it fired? To what end 
is it being worked? and you have the forecast 
of its fortunes, and the problem of its destiny 
can be instantly solved. That which is built up 
in the fear of God and the love of man, will abide 
and survive all the shocks of earth and time; 
that which is built up in defiance of God and of 
the rights of man will be as dust and chaff. It 
matters not how wealthy or powerful or finely 
organised or highly weaponed, or cleverly ad- 
ministered, the combine may be, nor under what 
distinguished patronage it may flourish, if it holds 
in its heart the negation of God, and the disregard 
of man then though it be exalted to heaven with 
privilege it will be thrust down in to the hell of 
perdition. God is the one all-binding concept, the 
universal term in which alone all particulars find 
their unity and come to rest. There have been 
federations from the Tower of Babel down, but 
like it they have all ended in confusion, when 


134 THE THRESHOLD 


the structural principle has been independence of 
God and indifference to man. Or, to put it still 
more plainly, they have been built up on a two- 
fold falsehood—their two corner stones have been 
these twin lies—repudiation of God; exploitation 
of man. These lies are linked by a logic that is 
adamant. Hatred of God and inhumanity to man 
have always gone together. You cannot find 
fraternal brothers among unfilial sons, and any 
brotherhood of man that does not root itself in 
the soil of fulfilled relations to God will lack 
depth of earth and speedily wither away. 

Let us be warned against ignoring or defying 
the subjective Revelation to which we have 
referred—that inner witness for God, that bit 
of localised Deity, we call conscience, loyalty to 
which can alone give unity to life which other- 
wise must be torn in twain. In order to be guilty 
of disloyalty in an earthly sense it is not neces- 
sary that a man should personally insult his ruler. 
An affront offered to his representative, will be so 
interpreted and become an indictable offence. So 
in order to be ungodly a man need not say or do 
anything by which the name of God will be dis- 
honoured among men. All he requires to do is to 
treat conscience, God’s local representative, with 


BUT THE UNGODLY ARE NOT SO 135 


contemptuous disregard, and what he does against 
conscience God will hold as being done against 
Himself. By a law as subtle as it is inevitable, 
will the disintegration of character set in; for the 
only solid ground upon which a man can stand 
and start to build up anything in the way of a 
permanent moral structure has to be found in his 
fidelity to conscience. He must be true to the 
inner voice. This is fundamental. It does not 
matter what good work he may put into the super- 
structure; unless this foundation work be well 
and truly done, everything will come toppling 
into ruins about his ears. There will be no need 
of any outside force to compass his destruction; 
he will break up from within, and the driving 
wind will only complete the work of disintegra- 
tion, which his infidelity to conscience commenced. 

Do these words meet the eye of any man whose 
conscience is hostile to his way of life, so that he 
has to carry on with the best part of him, not 
only out of business, but in positive opposition? 
Then let me say to him: You have forsaken Duty 
for Desire; you have forsaken Truth for a lie; 
and unless you spring back to the side of con- 
science, there is only one end to your track—for 
the judgment of conscience within is merely a 


136 THE THRESHOLD 


forecast of the judgment of God beyond. It is 
to save you and me from this judgment, to head 
us off the path of lies, and back to truth that the 
whole ministry of Redemption is directed. To 
save us from this lie, the spirit of Truth is ever 
on your track. Francis ‘Thomson’s great lines 
might well become the man who speeds from this 
spirit of ‘Truth: 


I fled Him down the nights and down the days; 
I fled Him down the arches of the years ; 
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways 
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter, 
Up vistaed hopes I sped; 
And shot, precipitated 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasméd fears, 
From those strong feet that followed, followed after, 
But with unhurrying chase, 
And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 
They beat, and a Voice beat, 
More instant than the feet, 
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.” 


IX 
The Ungodly Shall Not Stand in the 


Judgment 


This text has a forward look. It has to do 
with futures—contrasted futures. It is a fore- 
cast of destinies—divergent destinies. We felt 
that this was coming. It was inevitable—the 
only logical outcome of the situations here de- 
scribed. To this has the whole trend of the Psalm- 
ist’s thought been leading. From his very first 
word it became clear that he was about to strike 
out a startling study in contrasts. There would 
have been no point in his clear-cut distinction, be- 
tween the godly and ungedly man at the outset, if 
they had ultimately to fare alike, and fetch up 
at the same destination. This would have been 
not only false art, but bad morality. Both 
esthetic taste and moral sense must have taken 
offence at such confusion. For however indis- 
criminately men may be mixed up in the throng 
of the market-place and in the daily struggle for 
place and power—however indistinguishable they 

137 


138 THE THRESHOLD 


may be in the mass, distinction we know there és. 
It is a distinction moreover, that laughs to scorn 
our arbitrary social classifications on the basis 
of mere wealth, or learning or prestige. It pushes 
behind and beneath all that is surface and acci- 
dental, to those deep and essential qualities that 
constitute character, and there it setseup its judg- 
ment seat. Contrasted choice had to express itself 
in contrasted conduct; contrasted conduct had to 
crystallise into contrasted character; and con- 
trasted character had to finalise into contrasted 
destiny, if the moral fitness of things was to be 
preserved, and the ethical necessities of the case 
be met. 

But this forward look is not common in the 
Old Testament Scriptures; at least, not in any- 
thing like clear and decisive outline. The ancient 
Hebrew doctrine of a future life was nebulous 
in the extreme. One feels that it was not so much 
any hope of personal immortality by which they 
were stirred as that of national perpetuity—the 
survival of Israel as a nation. The individual 
aspiration toward an endless future was swal- 
lowed up in the larger hope and expectation for 
the corporate continuity of the community. 

Although it has been claimed and with some 


THE UNGODLY SHALL NOT STAND 139 


show of reason that the doctrine of personal im- 
mortality was held by some of the Old Testament 
writers, one has the feeling that they rather bor- 
rowed it from other faiths, than evolved it from 
their own. Christ shows, however, that it lay 
implicit but unsuspected in the ancient warrant 
under which Moses had accepted his commission 
to lead the chosen people from Egypt to the 
Promised Land. But until Jesus quoted that 
ancient pronouncement “I am the God of Abra- 
ham” who would ever have dreamt of finding 
in it a proof-passage of personal immortality and 
the pledge of a life beyond the grave? Doubt- 
less the higher spirits, among whom must be in- 
cluded the author of our Psalm, had intimations 
of immortality which they gathered up and ex- 
pressed in fine foreshadowings which they them- 
selves, however, but dimly understood. 

But deep in the heart of man has been kindled 
a passion for the permanent, which all the streams 
of time and circumstance have never been able 
to quench. There has always been an instinctive 
belief that high over all the weavings of time 
and change, there is that which survives, and 
abides—‘“‘unchanging in the midst of change,” as 
Schiller says. “‘There is one Quiet Spirit,” from 


140 THE THRESHOLD 


whom all other spirits have emanated and to 
whom, when they have completed their cycle they 
shall ail return. 

Now this is the unexpressed assumption un- 
derlying the whole of this Psalm, and which in 
order to get its full understanding must now be 
brought into view. It is controlling all the 
Psalmist’s thought and feeling from the first 
word to the last, which two words gather up and 
in vivid terms portray the contrast, which all the 
words between them are employed to express and 
enforce. ‘This dominating element gives confi- 
dence to the Psalmist’s mind, precision to his dis- 
crimination, and point to his words. Clearly this 
man knows the human heart, and is certain of 
his ground; so certain indeed that he can build 
upon it with the utmost confidence that the struc- 
ture which he rears can never be disturbed. True, 
he does not gather up and apply what he has been 
teaching, but the application is all the more 
powerful, the appeal is all the more poignant, 
that the reader is compelled to make it for him- 
self. This compulsion springs out of the under- 
lying assumption to which we have already re- 
ferred, and thus abundantly proves its truth. It 
is the twofold fact tenaciously and universally 


THE UNGODLY SHALL NOT STAND 141 


held, first, that in spite of all the changes of this 
mortal life, there is a belief in an abiding element 
that no age can wither and no power destroy; 
and secondly, that the desire to come into its 
possession and hold it for our own, has been the 
driving wheel of all lofty and sustained endeav- 
our in the life history of the race. It is the ele- 
ment of change and inconstancy against which the 
human spirit protests. Man resents the repeated 
betrayal of his hopes. If he could but be assured 
that over against the indwelling hunger for the 
permanent, there has been placed the meat that 
endureth unto everlasting life, that over against 
the tottering fabrics of time there has been placed 
the ‘House not made with hands, eternal in the 
Heavens,” then he could still bear up and carry 
on, in the very teeth of disaster and defeat. This 
is the one thing needful to hearten the good man, 
and put solid ground beneath his feet, viz., that he 
is in the thing that is going to last. This is the 
one all-confounding, disconcerting thing to the 
ungodly, that he is putting everything into a bag 
with holes; that his treasure is laid up where 
moth and rust corrupt and thieves break through 
and steal. He has put by nothing for a rainy 
day. He has not even a roof to keep him from 


142 THE THRESHOLD 


the wet. His house is built on sand so that when, 
as Christ declares, the floods come and the winds 
blow, it topples into ruins about his ears. 
Whatever else then may have been dim and un- 
certain to the Psalmist’s mind, this at least was 
clear, that the moral contrasts in the way of 
character must have a corresponding contrast in 
the way of destiny, and that contrast, the judg- 
ment will declare. It is no less clear that in the 
Psalmist’s estimate man’s destiny does not ter- 
minate with earth and time. If it did, his whole 
philosophy of life could easily be refuted. Noth- 
ing was more certain ¢hen, as nothing is more 
patent now, that so far as this life is concerned, 
and narrowing our view to three score years and 
ten, the ungodly have frequently the happier lot; 
that is to say, measured by merely material stand- 
ards and cutting out the moral satisfactions that 
the godly enjoy—which we are bound to do if 
we make existence co-terminous with the grave. 
On the principle, however, of an infinitely ex- 
tended duration of being, in which for the godly 
an eternal weight of glory is shown, as making 
light by contrast the momentary afflictions of 
time, it seems only a fair thing that the ungodly 
should have the best of it here. At any rate, see- 


THE UNGODLY SHALL NOT STAND 143 


ing the godly hold the promise of the future, they 
should be the last to grudge to the ungodly the 
full enjoyment of the present. Such enjoyment 
is perfectly explicable and indeed equitable. If 
a man elects to live only for the present moment 
and is prepared to pay the price for the present 
moment, then it is only fair that he should get 
what he pays for. If he gives more than it is 
worth, and finds that he has been fooled, well, 
that is his own lookout. If he chooses to pay 
away character for gold, a clear conscience for 
some coveted honour, peace of mind for worldly 
place and power, and the abiding glories of eter- 
nity for the perishing garlands of time, there is 
no one who can prevent him. He is master of 
his fate. He has the management of his own 
affairs, the investment of his own capital, the 
handling of his own securities. If he prefers to 
fool them away in worthless deals, that is his 
concern. All these things are his own, to mort- 
gage, to barter, or to retain—to multiply or stul- 
tify at will. But it is only fair that he should 
have the issues clearly placed before him, and that 
he should know what he is doing before being 
called upon to decide. Because to put before a 
man alternatives of choice which carry such tre- 


144 THE THRESHOLD 


mendous consequences, and at the same time veil 
from him the alternatives of destiny which those 
choices involve, would not be a square deal. It 
would be to put him at such a manifest disad- 
vantage that should he in his ignorance make a 
wrongful selection, he might well turn upon his 
Maker and challenge His right to cast the creature 
which his hands have made in consequences which 
he could not foresee, and which he would never 
have willingly incurred. 

Now according to the teaching of this book 
there has never been a time, nor a place, nor a 
people in history, that has not had light and 
knowledge enough to make a right moral decision. 
This light is not merely an external and imper- 
sonal illumination flashed in upon the soul from 
without, and enabling it to discern between right 
and wrong. It is an internal and personal pres- 
ence, a Someone not ourselves, who not content 
that the whole field of the intentions should be 
lighted up and that good and evil should be 
clearly set before us in strong and striking con- 
trast, urges the will with beseeching entreaty to 
refuse the evil and to choose the good. 

According to our lesson, this other than our- 
selves, this Light that lightens every man that 


THE UNGODLY SHALL NOT STAND 149 


cometh into the world is no less than Christ 
himself; and He has always been thus identified 
with the race, working in the heart of it, un- 
recognised but felt; incarnating himself through 
all the ages before His earthly advent, entering 
into all the struggles of the race which he was 
pledged from the outset to redeem. The Sun of 
Righteousness thus arises in the consciousness of 
every man that cometh into the world. This 
sunrise may not be greeted with equal gladness 
by all upon whom it breaks—Christ has shown 
how men’s moral preferences determine their atti- 
tude towards its revelations. When their deeds 
are evil, the light becomes a disturbing presence 
and they seek the more friendly darkness, not 
merely because under its cover detection is less 
likely, but for the sake of their own comfort, and 
to veil from themselves the vision of their own 
defilement, which the white radiance of this inner 
light blackens into a hideous blot. For us to go 
against conscience is to go against Christ, but to 
go against Him is to have Him against us, and 
this no man of us can afford. We need Him. 
We cannot do without Him. We have a record 
stained and marred by selfishness and sin, but 
it is a record which He has taken over, and is 


146 THE THRESHOLD 


prepared to cancel for all who will receive Him 
as their Saviour and Lord. We are moving up 
to judgment, but He waits to be retained on our 
behalf. A whisper will secure His advocacy. 
By His cross He has won this right to appear on 
our behalf. 


Yea, Thou wilt answer for us, Righteous Lord! 
Thine all the merits, ours the great reward; 

Thine the sharp thorns, and ours the golden crown; 
Ours the life won, and Thine the life laid down. 


X 


For the Lord Knoweth the Way of the 
Righteous; But the Way of the 
Ungodly Shall Perish 


The Psalmist is still extending his line of cleav- 
age. He has returned to his figure of the divided 
ways and is following them to their widely differ- 
ent ends. This unveiling of ultimate issues is 
full of sobering significance. Contrasted courses 
of conduct lead inevitably to contrasted goals. 
The way of the righteous is a divinely prescribed 
method of life. It is a life under law, not of 
ordinance from without but of regulative prin- 
ciples from within. This liberation from outside 
legislation, this shifting of the seat of rule, so 
that the centre of administration is within the 
man’s own breast, marks a great advance on the 
legal righteousness which observes mere prohibi- 
tion and command. It is the end to which all 
statute law is directed. The divine method as 
deduced from the Scriptures, is from many laws 
to few, and from few to none. Hence “Christ 

147 


148 THE THRESHOLD 


is the end of the law for righteousness to every 
one that believeth.” He becomes the end of 
the law by becoming the beginning of a principle. 
Christ formed in the heart, releases us from the 
petty laws and ordinances—‘“Touch not, taste 
not, handle not.” ‘“The righteousness which is of 
faith saith. . . .”-““The word is nigh thee, even 
in thy mouth and in thy heart.” This is God’s 
redeeming purpose, to create within us a new life 
principle and then, stripping us of all external 
legislation, to say to us, “You have the freedom 
of the universe, you can go where you like, you 
can do what you like, you can eat what you like, 
you can drink what you like;” because He knows 
that such freedmen will neither eat nor drink nor 
do anything else excepting for the glory of God 
and the betterment of their brother-men. There 
is a great passage in the Eighth Chapter of St. 
Paul’s letter to the Romans which strongly bears 
on this—‘““The law of the spirit of life in Christ 
Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin 
and death.”” The great Apostle has been showing 
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus from the 
condemnation and tyranny of sin. The emanci- 
pation 1s accompanied, if not really effected, by 
a voluntary break on the part of the redeemed 


FOR THE LORD KNOWETH THE WAY 149 


soul with one environment, and the setting up 
of correspondence with another. The freedman 
passes from the rulership of the flesh to that of 
the spirit. But as we have seen, it is a freedom 
under law and effected by law. There is nothing 
capricious or haphazard in the transaction. It is 
represented as being in perfect order and quite in 
accordance with some prearranged process and 
plan. Here are two laws set over against one an- 
other—‘“‘the law of the Spirit of life” and “the 
law of sin and death,” with the heart of man 
supplying both the field of their contest, and the 
object of their strife. In each of these cases 
the word “law” must be construed as a working 
force. It is in this sense that the Apostle employs 
the term, because then as now it was its popular 
meaning, though, as we have shown in a previous 
study, in a strictly scientific sense “law” and 
“force” must always be distinguished. Laws are 
merely the registered observations of how forces 
behave, the conditions they observe and the direc- 
tions they take. We perceive in the world of 
things that, given certain antecedent conditions, 
certain sequences uniformly succeed; whereupon 
we describe such uniformity of succession as the 
“law” of that particular process. But the law 


150 THE THRESHOLD 


is not the process and must not be confounded 
with it. It simply lays down the lines, so to speak, 
along which the process moves to its end. It 1s, 
to the force that follows its lead, what the per- 
manent way is to a train, only without the train’s 
possibility of deviation; for nature’s rolling-stock 
never jumps the points, nor leaves its predeter- 
mined track. 

We recognise the reign of law in the physical 
realm and adjust our conduct to its inevitable- 
ness. ‘Safety first” is a canon of common sense, 
which, in all our handling of nature’s forces, it is 
our wisdom to observe. We know that no allow- 
ance is ever made in that realm for carelessness 
or contempt. It is true we can often play off 
one law against another to their mutual modifica- 
tion and to the emergence and enlistment of a 
third, which, but for such offset, would never 
have been suspected to exist. But all this be- 
comes possible because of the absolute steadfast- 
ness and regularity with which the forces of 
nature observe their laws, and the obedience with 
which we line up with their requirements. Only 
in proportion as we obey nature can we command 
her. To utilise her forces we must keep step 
with her and go her way. Now, from what Paul 


~~ 


FOR THE LORD KNOWETH THE WAY 151 


says it would appear that what we find possible 
in the physical realm and under material laws, 
has its parallel of possibility in the spiritual 
realm, and under moral laws. ‘The law of the 
spirit of life’ under which the righteous man 
pursues his course, is set over against “the law 
of sin and death” by which the ungodly man is 
controlled. 

When it is said that “the Lord knoweth the 
way of the righteous,” it must be understood to 
mean that it is the way of God’s appointment and 
approval. It is the way of the Lord for man’s 
life and conduct. It is the track to the realisation 
of the divine purpose and desire. It is the limita- 
tion within which man can alone become and 
achieve his best, or reach his finest and most com- 
plete self-expression. A way means direction and 
progress and an end to which it leads. It carries 
the idea of definiteness and delineation. 

It is the way along which the righteous man 
finds the enabling dynamic for all the claims of 
life and service. He picks up energy by the very 
act of pursuing his track. Running on concur- 
tently with him is a veritable stream of enabling 
force that feeds the strength of every saint. Our 
great locomotives are so constructed that they can 


152 THE THRESHOLD 


pick up water as they go and thus replenish their 
waste. But such supply is found strictly within 
the lines prescribed by the “permanent way,” and 
is only available as an engine is moving up to a 
certain rate of speed. Anything under, say 
twenty-five miles an hour, would disqualify it 
from tapping these reserves. Let it loiter and 
linger along the lines and its appropriating func-_ 
tion cannot come into operation, with the result, 
that so far as it is concerned, all the wealth of 
provision must go by default. 

The godly man then in pursuing his course of 
conduct along the lines of God’s ‘‘permanent 
way, which is the way of righteousness, finds him- 
self divinely empowered. In proportion to his 
diligence will he be able to appropriate supplies. 
He links up with the Eternal. He enlists the 
“Powers of the world to come.” The stars in 
their courses fight on his behalf. He is on the 
winning side. No weapon that is formed against 
him can prosper. He is in with a combine that 
will outlive and outlast all the accidents of earth 
and time; for, “The world passeth away and the 
lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God 
abideth for ever.” 

“But the way of the ungodly shall perish.” 


FOR THE LORD KNOWETH THE WAY 153 


That is to say, his course of life gets him nowhere. 
It is a track that loses itself. Its so-called freedom 
is a delusion and a snare. It beckons only to 
betray. It leaves a man down-and-out. He 
finds himself homeless and unblest. Instead of 
his track yielding blessedness and reinforcement, 
it is a path that drains and depletes his physical, 
mental, and moral force. Any one who has ever 
missed his way on a moor or fen, or in the forest 
gloom, where multitudinous tracks cross and re- 
cross in bewildering confusion, will understand 
what it is to strike a path that perishes. It looks 
at first like some clearly defined road to some cer- 
tain seat and centre of home-life. With joyful 
expectation the belated traveller picks up the 
trail, only however to find it growing fainter and 
fainter till at last it dies away into entire oblitera- 
tion—a perished path! The forest lands and 
prairie wastes of every country have had their 
tragedies, in which despairing travellers “have 
laid them down in their last sleep,’ and years 
after their white bones have told the story of 
desperation and defeat. This is bad enough and 
sad enough when only the body is concerned; but 
when, as in the case with which the Psalmist deals, 
it is the soul that is involved, the tragedy deepens 


154 THE THRESHOLD 


into sevenfold gloom. Life running to waste 
through wickedness—life shorn of its beauty and 
smitten of its crown, pushing its tired way across 
the trackless desert of ‘no God,” with the sun 
beating down upon its unprotected head, with no 
shelter from the heat—no friendly rock to shadow 
in the weary land—stumbling blindly and pain- 
fully and with the horror of a great loneliness 
gripping the soul—this 1s the picture which the 
Psalmist sets before us, in its stark nakedness, 
that perchance he may startle us into attention, 
and turn us from the error of our ways. 

Have any of us thus wandered into the wilder- 
ness, and is the devil of despair mocking us with 
his laughter of derision, bidding us abandon hope 
of rescue or return? Then he is a liar, for we 
have to do with the “God of Hope,” who bends 
with infinite tenderness over the distracted and 
disillusioned soul, and, if we will but turn to him, 
with the faintest flicker of homesick desire, we 
shall be caught up to His mighty heart, and know 
as we have never known before, that God is love. 


THE END 





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